Think again, Mr. President

Human Events, Aug 20, 2001 by Jeffrey, Terence P

Inside Washington

Bush Must Reconsider Stem Cell Decision

George W. Bush announced last week that he intends to make taxpayers fund research in which one human being has been killed in the hope of helping another.

The President said he decided to do this after "a great deal of thought."

Fair enough. But the President's thought was seriously flawed. In the end, although he got the basic premise and principle right, his reasoning was illogical, and his conclusion was wrong. And considering that the question at issue was the protection of human life, the consequences of the President's illogic may be that innocent human beings are killed.

Let's start where the President started: in his campaign declarations.

On Nov. 21, 1999, on NBC's "Meet the Press," then-- candidate Bush affirmed the basic fact from which any discussion of this research must begin.

Tim Russert asked, "Do you believe life begins at conception?"

"I do," said Bush.

Nine months later, President Clinton proposed new regulations attempting to circumvent a federal law, enacted by, the Republican Congress in 1996, that prohibits federal funding for research "in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death."

Clinton's proposed rules, the Washington Post reported, "forbid the use of federal funds to destroy embryos directly, but they permit federal research on stem cells taken from embryos by privately financed researchers."

The response from candidate Bush was emphatic. "The governor opposes federal funding for stem cell research that involves destroying a living human embryo," said campaign spokesman Ray Sullivan. But what of Clinton's effort to finesse the issue by funding research only after the killing was done by private money? Reported the Post: "In Bush's view, Sullivan said, that still amounts to federal support of embryo destruction."

In October, Bush reiterated this position in a written statement to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "Taxpayer funds," said Bush, "should not underwrite research that involves the destruction of live human embryos."

As late as May 18, Bush stood firmly by this position. "I oppose federal funding for stem cell research that involves destroying living human embryos," the President wrote in a letter to the Culture of Life Foundation.

Although Bush never published a succinct syllogism summarizing his argument, it is easy to infer what it was:

1) Human life begins at conception.

2) It is wrong to deliberately take an innocent human life.

3) Taxpayers, therefore, should not be forced by government to subsidize scientists who do research that begins with the deliberate destruction of innocent lives.

This was good logic. The fact that human life begins at conception is undisputed by human embryologists. The principle that it is wrong to deliberately take innocent human life was embraced by the Founding Fathers when they said in the Declaration of Independence that all men are endowed by the Creator with a right to life.

Given this sound premise and principle embraced by the President, it might be wondered why he did not seek to ban the killing of human embryos, period.

Instead, egged on by a public lobbying campaign, he started to question his original, logical, position.

Sen. Orrin Hath (R.-Utah) suggested that he adopt the geographical theory of human life: whether you are a human being or not depends on where you are, not who you are. An embryo in a test tube, Hatch argued, was not a human life, even if the same embryo in a fallopian tube was. According to this thinking, if someone built a large test tube, and dropped Hatch into it, he would cease to be a human life.

Sen. Bill Frist (R.-Tenn.) advanced the age theory of human value: Human life begins at conception, he conceded, therefore a human embryo is a human life even in a test tube. But the moral value of human life increases as a human being grows older, and, human beings up to a certain age have not, as yet, attained sufficient "moral significance" to have a right to life and thus may be killed to benefit other human beings-especially if they are going to be discarded and die anyway. "I believe that those first few cells are alive and that they are living and that moral significance over time may vary, and again, this is individual interpretation," Frist explained on MSNBC's "Hardball."

The Frist Rule, rigorously applied, means a parent could "individually interpret" whether it was acceptable to discard a child at any age because he or she believed that child had not yet attained the "moral significance" of a full human being. The federal government, then, could fund research on organs carved out of full-grown babies whose parents were going to discard them anyway.

The Frist Rule is basically the same as the Peter Singer rule: The powerful can place their own value on the lives of the weak.

Lives Depend on It

President Bush could have accepted the false premise of either Hatch or Frist and still have concluded that the taxpayers in a constitutional republic should not be forced to fund research that involves killing a human embryo-no matter what value or rights or humanity the national elite in Washington, D.C., had determined it was willing to concede to that embryo.