Obama Not to Rescind Bush ESCR Funding Policy?
I am not sure what to make of this. According to a Politico writer, President Obama many not rescind President Bush's embryonic stem cell funding executive order. He is going to leave it to the Congress. From the story:
Obama pledged during the campaign to lift the restrictions, and political observers had expected him to move swiftly to reverse President Bush's 2001 executive order--most likely with his own executive order.Hmmm. That would be a dramatic reversal of an earlier promise. Moreover, it will take time to accomplish. On the other hand, it would mean that his fingerprints would not be on the deed. Good politics, I think, because he would get credit for signing the bill but not blame for opening the door.
But the president-elect suggested Friday that he would wait for Congress to weigh in on the issue. "Well, if we can do something legislative then I usually prefer a legislative process because those are the people's representatives," Obama said in a CNN interview. "And I think that on embryonic stem cell research, the fact that you have a bipartisan support around that issue, the fact that you have Republicans like Orrin Hatch who are fierce opponents of abortion and yet recognize that there is a moral and ethical mechanism to ensure that people with Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's can actually find potentially some hope out there, you know, I think that sends a powerful message.
Also, it can lead to a far more radical research license than could be done by the President alone. But legislation is never totally predictable. That uncertainty can also open up opportunities for opponents to educate the President (whose comment about Alzheimer's shows that he needs it) and the public--such as the incredible breakthroughs happening with adult stem cells and the potential of "alternative methods" to heal the breach that this issue has caused to the body politic.
Labels: Embryonic Stem Cell Research. Bush Funding Policy. President Barack Obama Biotechnology Policies
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 9:55 AM
15 Comments
15 Comments:
Sad, these few postings show how far down the road we are in commodification of human life. Embryos and organs are mere commodities whose value must be "enhanced" by being efficiently used to maximum "benefit". At this rate human life will have less intrinsic value than a "sea kitten" but more economic value. Kinda like the attitude towards slaves...they weren't fully "human" but they were worth money in the "market". Thank you for all the work you put into bringing us this information Mr. Smith.
My impression, Wesley, is that there may be a legal reason for this. If I'm not mistaken, Congress had already forbidden the use of federal funds for embryo-killing research. All Bush did was to sort of bend that in 2001 so that research could be done on lines procured from embryos already killed prior to his August 9 speech. But the original background of the law was congressional. (I'm going by memory here, but I believe it was the Dickey amendment.) It isn't clear to me, despite all the howling against Bush, that Bush has ever had the sole power by executive order to open funding for embryo-killing research unless the actual law was changed. And in that case, neither does Obama. Maybe somebody informed Obama on this point.
An analogy would be women in combat. All that presidents have been able to do is to keep defining "combat" in more and more creative ways. But the actual ban on women in combat is congressional and legislative in origin and remains on the books.
Lydia: Nope. He could do it legally if he wants to. If the story is accurate, he may be thinking more radically than mere funding.
It gets a little complicated. There is something called the Dickey Amendment, that prevents federal money to be used in embryo destructive research. Clinton got around it by signing an executive order stating that while fed money wouldn't go to making the stem cell lines--which involves embryo destruction--AFTER THEY ARE MADE, and if "excess" embryos were used, federal $ could be spent on ESCR. That passed a court test, but then Clinton went out of office before it got started.
Bush rescinded Clinton's EO, and replaced it with the one that permits funding but only on stem cell lines in creation before 8.9.01. In that way there is no incentive to destroy embryos in anticipation of getting federal money.
Obama has said he will basically go back to the Clinton approach. But once he does that, the fire goes out of the issue.
If, however, he says to Congress, "You deal with it," a whole new and more radical ball game is in the offing, not just for the ESCR funding policy, but I think perhaps Dickey ITSELF could be at risk because that has to pass each year as part of the budgetary process.
If Dickey is repealed, then fed $ can go to destroy the embryos as well as afterwards--and not just in ESCR, but for other experiments and to fund the creation of embryos for research as well as therapeutic cloning.
So, we can see where this could lead. However, no EO also means we can fight!
Thanks for the explanation, Wesley. I remember the Clinton end-run now. In fact, it actually is a _lot_ like my women in combat analogy. Clinton was quite clever there.
Truth to tell, I think the researchers wouldn't be fully happy with just a return to the Clinton approach, which is a legal fiction, anyway.
I agree Lydia. The leaders of the Science Establishment have already made it clear they want to do cloning and be able to make natural embryos for research. They are agititing to be able to buy eggs. They say that they don't want reproductive cloning, for now, because of safety concerns. But how would you make it "safe?" It would have to be via mass cloning and termination advancing the time of gestation as they went along.
Regardless of where one stands on the issue, I thought that Mike Huckabee had a good point this weekend when he
answered someone who said that opposition to ESCR and abortion were based on religious, not scientific, views about whether ESCR takes a human life,Huckabee said, "Well, I think there is a scientific argument for that position. It's alive, it's human. It's not a puppy, it's not broccolli, it's human." The person said, "Yes, well, that's not what Bush said."
Sadly, humans, especially males, stopped having any value long ago - governments draft men to fight pointless wars, men are exploited for their physical abilities (slaves), and women are exploited/kidnapped/assaulted for their high sexual/physical value, average Western men are treated as little more than sperm donors and paychecks. I often wonder if the value of human life could be restored if we stopped treating people as commodities in the more subtle, yet common, everyday scenarios listed above.
Hello, all.
I'm pleased to say the WASHINGTON TIMES printed an op-ed of mine today, one that thanks President Bush for his service, and ESCR is one of the three major things I mentioned:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jan/20/sincere-gratitude-to-george-w-bush/
bmmg39: Congratulations!
bmmg39: God bless you.
This is all because we "want things better" and give science and medicine too much status and credibility instead of treating them as the servants, to be thanked but kept under control and in their place, that they are, and because we place emphasis on money rather than ethics. In a society in which everyone is supposed to be equal and have the chance to "advance." In a less "modern, open" society, the death culture wouldn't be tolerated. Status, in terms of whether other animals and other parts of nature have, or might have, the same as our own, is not the issue; the issue is what happens when "everyone has a chance." WE started the "rights" movements by deciding that everyone is equal -- which everyone is NOT, except in terms of the right to life and not to be harmed. Once we had an open society, those of lesser breeding were able to advance in a world in which financial success was the paramount criterium. That's how we got unethical science and medicine and how people went stupid. Yet we still want the "benefits" of what those we have given free rein to be unethical do. Wanting the "advances" is utilitarian, in a world that's become utilitarian because of democracy. Don't blame the animal and environmental rights people; that's just an extension from where the problem started -- with humans. Just because everyone has a right to live and to be treated ethically does not mean that everyone is equal and as good as everyone else. Democracy has given us loss of standards.
That should have been CRITERION. All this has been developing since the eighteenth century, and we're seeing the effect now, worldwide. It may seem paradoxical at first, but in a less "free" society where standards are imposed and prevail, utilitarianism does not take hold as it has in ours, and things are as people understand them to be -- not all this "nice" nonsense we've got that goes along with ignorance and lack of standards, ethics, and proper priorities. Slavery in the ancient world, ius paterfamilias, the king's droit, Cossacks, the sweatshop owner -- at least people knew what they were dealing with then. It hasn't turned out to be an advance that parents' ambitions for their kid "to be a doctor and make a good living" were able to be fulfilled, and everybody goes to college but most have not learned to think, and "science" has given us "advances" that human exceptionalism does not seem to understand cannot ultimately benefit us and do not come without the price of the death culture when they were gained in an immoral fashion. Sure, we've got ventilators; we've also got hospital euthanasia. The same society that wants the "advances" has given us Switzerland, Holland, modern England, Washington, Montana, and a U.S. electorate that just chose Obama. The same idiots pay more for the economy size, think "living wills" are to their benefit, and think Kevorkian and Quill are out to help people. In its original form, democracy was not extended to everyone, and yielded a society that made tremendous advances, in the ways that are important, without animal experimentation or having to worry about the death culture. We don't have a thinking society because money is our society's priority, and money is its priority because too many people are free to have it without being obligated to think. The result is a society in which the elderly and the disabled are discounted, disrespected, abused, discarded, and murdered because respect for life itself went out the window at the same time as "everybody is as good as and entitled as everybody else" came in, along with money, which destroys when not kept in its proper place just as science does, as the primary priority. And no one says anything, because with everyone "able to get an education," stupidity has taken over.
Which is why if we're going to think of it in terms of status, as human exceptionalism see,s bound and determined to do despite that not being the issue, we've ended up in better and more trustworthy company with non-human animals, who know who and what they are, and what's what, than with most of our fellow humans, who have proven to deserve less respect than non-human animals, and the elderly and disabled among humans, do. Credit must not be given where it is not deserved. That was the mistake that started all the rest of the mess, and the problem is within our own species. Saying that we are special because we're human doesn't hold water when we can't do as good a job of being ourselves as the other animals do of being themselves, and if what we've got now is the best we can do, we've got a lot of nerve feeling entitled to experiment on other animals for our own benefit when we've created a death culture we can't do more about than say well that's not good is it, this is really terrible. Leave the animals alone, straighten ourselves out, and go after those pushing the death culture is the only way our species is going to be able to survive. I for one would rather survive myself, and that its innocent victims (what happens to its stupid ones would be a benefit overall) than that those pushing the death culture do. But then, I don't claim to be a member of a "superior" species, and I have the same approach to life and its value that a non-human animal does. That's not utilitarian, unless one wants to equate utilitarianism with survival. Utilitarianism is wanting the benefits of animal research and defining morality in such a way as to make what isn't moral be considered moral, just as Princeton gave Singer a chair on the grounds that he's a philosopher and this is the academic freedom, etc. The human race has survived perfectly well without the kind of modern science we've got now. In fact, better. Human exceptionalism is just another form of greed, and that's why it can't stop the death culture no matter how wrong it sees that it is.
Because human exceptionalism is PART of the death culture, just as "hospice" and "bioethics" are.
And just as certain religions, including Christianity, are.
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