The Senate approved legislation Tuesday that would overturn President Bush's limits on using taxpayer funds to pay for embryonic stem cell research. The 63-37 vote for the bill was four votes short of having the two-thirds vote necessary to override an expected presidential veto.
The veto, expected tomorrow, would be the first of Bush's 5 1/2-year presidency.
Sadly, supporters of the legislation included several prominent Republicans, among them Nancy Reagan, Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) presented a common argument in favor of the bill, claiming "it is a clear-cut question to use embryos to save lives, because otherwise they will be destroyed." Fertility clinics hold about 400,000 unneeded embryos, he said, and only 128 have been "adopted" by families that played no role in creating them. "A century from now people will look back in amazement that we could even have this debate when the issues are so clearly cut," Specter said
Yet, as Joe Carter points out,
a 2003 survey by researchers at the RAND Corporation found that 88% of the embryos are being stored for their original function: to make babies for their parents. Only 2.2% of the embryos have been designated for disposal and less than 3% for research. That leaves only 11,000 "potential lives." For a country that has 125,000 adoptions every year, it would be reasonable to assume that most, if not all, 11,000 embryos could eventually be implanted by adoptive parents.�Too many senators have bought into and spread outrageous myths on embryonic stem cells, at times sounding like snake oil salesmen,� responded Concerned Women for America's Wendy Wright. �Cannibalizing embryos as if they were �fountains of youth,� sacrificing small humans to advance science, exploiting desperate patients for political purposes � and forcing us to pay for it � degrades all of us.
Outrageous myths? Well, even ESC researchers admit their research has been oversold:
"Many of the technologies we hyped to the general public haven't worked yet," Celgene Corp. president Alan Lewis said at a biotechnology trade show in Philadelphia earlier this year.The natural question is why the ESC hype is needed "To start with, people need a fairy tale," the Washington Post quoted Ronald D.G. McKay, a stem cell researcher at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke [source ]. "Maybe that's unfair, but they need a story line that's relatively simple to understand."
To fully exploit the stem cell hype, proponents of this bill implicitly denied the humanity of the unborn by asserting that those who have matured are far more valuable than the unborn lives slated to be sacrificed in the name of science and potential cures.
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Related: Embryonic Stem Cell Hype
