Stem Cell Research: An NPR Special Report
A ‘Virtual Roundtable’ on Federal Funding

Douglas Johnson

Douglas Johnson, legislative director, National Right to Life Committee:

The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) is opposed to all proposals — such as S. 723, sponsored by Senators Specter and Harkin — that would permit federal funding of research in which human embryos are destroyed.

Current law [the Dickey Amendment, in Public Law 106-554] prohibits federal funding of any “research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death.” This law embodies the principle that non-consenting human beings must not be subjected to harmful medical experimentation. The Specter-Harkin bill would rupture that principle by authorizing federally sponsored researchers to obtain living embryos and dissect them — thereby killing them — to obtain their stem cells.

Supporters of the bill argue that “embryonic stem cells themselves are not embryos.” But this is merely a crude attempt to sidestep the fact that the process begins with a living human embryo — an individual member of the species homo sapiens — and the act of removing the stem cells kills that human embryo. The Specter-Harkin bill would authorize federal funding of every stage of this process, including the act of killing, which the bill euphemistically refers to as “the derivation of stem cells.”

It is inaccurate to refer to these human beings as “fertilized eggs.” In harvesting stem cells, the human embryos are usually killed at about five days of age.

The debate is not about “stem cell research” per se. The federal government properly supports the work of many medical researchers who are utilizing human stem cells obtained from sources that do not require the destruction of human embryos, such as adult fat, blood, bone marrow and nerve tissue, as well as umbilical cords and placentas. There have been many recent breakthroughs in adult stem cell research, as detailed on the website of Do No Harm: The Coalition of Americans for Research Ethics (www.stemcellresearch.org).

Supporters of the Specter-Harkin bill argue that it “cannot result in creating human embryos,” but would merely utilize “donated embryos” who “would have otherwise been discarded.” In reality, there is a program (www.snowflakes.com) that arranges adoptions of embryos, and many thousands of couples want to adopt these so-called “surplus” embryos.

Each living human embryo is a unique member of species homo sapiens. We were each there once. Human beings should not be treated as commodities or as biological raw material.

Douglas Johnson is legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee (www.nrlc.org), based in Washington, D.C.