From the WSJ Opinion Archives
THINKING THINGS OVER
Stem Cells: A Wedge Issue?
The average voter isn't going to worry about a zygote.
Whether to allow federal funding for stem cell research is the most delicate and most interesting social-policy decision facing the young Bush administration. Also, I dare say, one of the least understood.
Only three years ago, scientists succeeded in isolating stem cells from excess embryos generated during in vitro fertilization procedures and from the incipient sexual organs of aborted fetuses. Medically this was a huge breakthrough; the cells can evolve into any organ of the body. Perhaps scientists can learn, for example, how to grow insulin-producing cells in diabetics. Stem cell research also promises a Niagara of biological advances. Ethically, however, it is problematical; the origin of the cells involves either abortion or the destruction of embryos. The imperative of science--do not impede knowledge--clashes with the imperative of morality--do not kill. The clash agitates both the scientific community and President Bush's anti-abortion constituency.
The administration canceled an April 25 meeting of the National Institutes of Health, which was about to take the first step toward funding the use of these cells under legal interpretations promulgated late in the Clinton administration. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson promised a review of the matter by this summer, which is to say shortly.
The current controversy is a reprise of the fetal implant issue when scientists made their first efforts to use fetal implants to cure Parkinson's disease. In 1988 the Reagan HHS declared a moratorium on funding for experimentation with fetal implants. Under George Bush the elder, it was made permanent despite a scientific panel that voted 19-2 the other way. President Clinton lifted the moratorium on his third day in office, and in 1993 Congress authorized such experiments with safeguards. While the Parkinson's experiments hurt the patients rather than helped them, the use of cell lines grown in culture from fetus cadaver cells is now commonplace in medical research, including that funded by the government.
In 1994, meanwhile, Congress attached what has become an annual rider to HHS appropriations to prohibit the funding of research that involves the destruction of embryos. The legislation defined an embryo as a fertilized egg, though technically an egg becomes an embryo when it is implanted in the uterine wall. Before that it's called a zygote; after nine weeks it's called a fetus.
Late in his term President Clinton issued guidelines to permit research employing ES cells, so long as public funds were not involved in the destruction of the embryo from which they were initially derived. This led to the NIH meeting the Bush administration canceled and to the current review. In short, the tangles of history, law, ethics and science leave the administration with a Gordian knot.
On the ultimate ethical question, the National Bioethics Advisory Commission took the position that while embryos deserve respectful and not cavalier treatment, they do not require the same respect as a fully formed person. Some religious authorities and traditions also adopt this view, but it is hotly disputed by Catholic and evangelical teaching. Much of the above description is taken from the NBAC reports, and I also take the NBAC ethical view. For example, I would find a funeral service for a blastocyst grotesque.
At the same time, I have a deep sympathy with the pro-life forces in American politics. For one thing, they have been lied to so many times, starting with the Roe v. Wade fiction that the Constitution speaks to the abortion issue. For another, they speak for real values. I'm not willing to delegate ethical issues to the scientific community--even, or maybe especially, Nobel laureates.
For a third, I keep moving closer to the pro-life position as I watch the slippery slope in action. I'm appalled at pro-choice forces defending partial birth abortion. While I don't feel entitled to decide precisely when a fetus becomes a fully formed person, clearly it is before birth. Medical discoveries keep suggesting an earlier and earlier point.
Scientists argue that prohibiting federal funding would decisively cripple research, or at least move its center to other nations. The British Parliament recently approved the production of stem cells through cloning, which even the Clinton administration had declined to fund. The NBAC proposed to allow funding of both EG and ES cells, with an elaborate set of procedures to ensure informed consent and outside review of each experiment.
The Bush administration's political instinct will be to look not only at its own pro-life constituency but also at the Catholic voters it has targeted in key states. The Clinton administration's decision to permit funding in the face of the congressional ban was also political, relying on a "meaning of 'is' is" separation of the use of stem cell lines from their derivation. But somehow I doubt that stem cells will be a wedge issue with ordinary voters; one has to be an intellectual to get excited about the rights of the zygote.
As a practical matter, leaving stem cell research entirely to private funding is likely to reduce the weight of ethical considerations. Even those of us in the mushy middle on abortion would like to have scientists stop and think before they start such experiments, which is what the NBAC proposals are designed to accomplish. And to the extent that my pro-life friends have a political objective of moving people like me closer to their view, what they've accomplished by making an issue of partial birth abortion is likely to be undone by making an issue of the blastocyst.
Mr. Bartley is editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
