08/24/2004: "Religion of the brave new world"

Eric Cohen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center makes the case for what is at stake in the campaign debate over embryonic stem cell research:

JOHN KERRY'S recent assertions about stem cell research are so obviously untrue and so easily refuted that he must on some level actually believe them�as only an ideologue can. He claims repeatedly that President Bush has "enacted a far-reaching ban on stem cell research"; in fact, the Bush administration provided over $200 million for stem cell research last year, including $25 million for embryonic stem cell research. He claims that stem cells will one day cure Alzheimer's disease, an ailment that uniquely terrifies the baby-boom generation. But leading scientists, including enthusiastic supporters of stem cell research, have made it clear that stem cells will not help treat Alzheimer's. Kerry claims that stem cell cures are "at our fingertips" and that "help is on the way," when in fact there has not been a single human trial of an embryonic stem cell therapy....

For a while, proponents of embryo research were willing to draw certain ethical lines and respect certain ethical limits. For example, when NIH proposed funding for the creation of embryos solely for research in 1994, the Clinton administration (which supported embryo research) rejected the proposal as too radical. And when President Bush deliberated about federal funding of stem cell research in 2001, stem cell advocates called for funding within limits: They argued that thousands of embryos were already frozen in storage, and that funding research on those embryos imposed no extra moral cost.

Today, the debate has moved on. Leading proponents of embryo research are more radical�demanding more public funding (without which they say research is "banned"), rejecting past limits, and promising the moon. Kerry epitomizes this radicalization of the stem cell movement. At Kerry's convention, Ron Reagan lauded "personal biological repair kits" derived from cloned embryos, and his running mate, Sen. John Edwards, endorsed "therapeutic cloning."

As recently as July, John Kerry co-sponsored a bill that would allow the creation of embryos by cloning for research so long as they are destroyed after 14 days. Thus, in the name of curing disease, he would have us perfect the technology necessary to clone children. And if recent history is any guide, the taboo against cloning to produce children will erode, as the left defends it as just another reproductive choice. Even more broadly, the possibility of banning a whole range of radical new types of human procreation�producing children with genes from two men or two women, say, or producing children whose parents are dead fetuses�may disappear.

It's a good thing Kerry believes that life begins at conception, or I'd be worried that he really thinks it's moral to create life only to deliberately kill it. Oh, wait a minute�that's the part of his faith that can't be imposed on others. Church and state and all that. Forgot.