Campaign Clips for 9 August 2004

Kerry - Edwards

Bush - Cheney

On the third anniversary of President George Bush's ban on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, John Edwards pledged that a Kerry-Edwards administration would overturn the ideologically-driven ban as part of its plan to put America back on the path of scientific excellence. “Today we mark a sad anniversary,” Edwards said. “But our focus isn’t on what happened three years ago - our focus is on what can happen for millions of Americans who have diseases and conditions that one day could be cured or abated by stem-cell therapy. Today is about what we can do to lift those roadblocks and allow science and compassion to do their work.” Millions of children and adults suffer from incurable diseases like diabetes, Parkinsons, Alzheimer's, heart disease, cancer and spinal cord injuries - diseases which could one day be cured by stem cell therapy. And yet on August 9, 2001, President Bush blocked researchers from finding treatments for such diseases by enacting a ban on any new stem cell lines created after that date. John Kerry and John Edwards are committed to scientific research based on fact, not ideology, and in the White House, will encourage the use of science and innovation to meet the challenges of the future, from job creation to medical breakthroughs to strengthening the American economy. Full story

John Kerry is blatantly misrepresenting President Bush's record on stem-cell research, insisting that the President has instituted a "ban" on research. In fact, the Bush Administration is the first ever to allow stem cell research, as this chart clearly shows. The decision that the President made three years ago today opened the door to this research for the first time, with appropriate ethical safeguards. Full story

The way I read this, both campaigns would rather tussle over semantics than over the real issue. It's a difficult one from a political standpoint, because the administration has succeeded in getting people to falsely associate embryonic stem cell research with the single most divisive long-standing issue in American politics: abortion. Both Kerry and Bush would much rather keep the debate at the level of "is it a ban, or not?" than delve into the real issue because it's such a hot button.

The current administration's policy is a ban, de facto, even though not de jure. Why? Because funding is available only to research that uses stem cell lines that pre-existed the policy. No funding is available for research that uses new cell lines. Note: this doens't just mean that funding is unavailable for creation of new cell lines. It means that fedreally funded researchers cannot use cell lines created after a certain date. This is a de facto ban because honest scientific research goes where the data tells it to go, not where the funding tells it it can go. If the data indicates that tests on additional cell lines are needed to confirm a hypothesis, that should happen. Knowing how likely this is to be the case in much of their research, scientists are not willing to start federally funded studies on existing cell lines for fear that the research will not be able to continue to it's proper conclusion.

The ban is sad and ridiculous. The GOP links the issue to right-to-life/a.k.a. anti-abortion rhetoric, when there is in fact no connection at all. Embryonic stem cells are not harvested from aborted fetuses. They are not harvested from fetuses at all. An embryo is not a fetus. A fetus does not exist until the fertilized embryo has implanted and developed. . This is not a specious distinction.

Embryonic stem cells exist only at the point where the fertilized egg has developed into a blastocyst of undifferentiated cells. Is it alive? Yes, in the same sense as a small colony of bacteria are alive. Can it develop into a human? Yes, but it won't unless it is implanted in a surrogate womb, and there's the key point.

The blastocysts used for development of embryonic stem cells never existed in a woman's womb. They were fertilized in vitro. They're not ever going to be implanted, because they are, for lack of a better word, "spares" that are a natural result of modern IVF technology -- technology that allows couples to create life when it would otherwise be impossible for them to do so. Technology that we should celebrate for all the benefits it brings. Technology that emulates what happens to fertilized embryos naturally -- e.g., some will develop and be born, but most will not.

Without a supply of willing surrogate wombs, these unused IVF embryos have as much chance of developing into a human life as a colony bacteria have of mutating and developing into intelligent life forms. We think nothing of performing federally funded research on bacteria, not to mention much higher life forms, including many species that are arguably intelligent, feeling creatures.

The ban on federally funded embryonic stem cell research is nothing more than a ploy by the administration to define "life" at such an early stage in development that it would set an undeniable precedent in the continuing debate on abortion. But no matter how you feel about abortion, the blatant falsehoods upon which the current policy is based should be patently obvious to you. Should be, however, is dangerous territory in politics, which is why Kerry and Edwards can't really afford to get too deeply into this topic. They will undoubtedly continue to keep their rhetoric limited to abstract things like "supporting science" and "curing diseases", because they know that they couldn't get away with saying what I just said above: that the unimplanted blastocysts that are left over from IVF procedures are ethically equivalent to a small colony of bacteria. And because the administration knows that first of all, they do not have clear majority support for their anti-abortion agenda, and secondly the facts are against them in trying to maintain the connection between these two issues anyhow, they can't afford to debate it in detail either.