Pro-Family Groups Ask Senators to Vote to Protect Human Embryos
by Jenni Parker and Bill Fancher
July 17, 2006
(AgapePress) - - The U.S. Senate is scheduled to begin debate today on three bioethics bills. While pro-life groups are urging the senators to protect the sanctity of human life, Republican Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas says this discussion, which has been a long time in coming, fails to address some relevant issues. "This is an incomplete debate," Brownback contends, because it will not include the topic of human cloning. He says the legislature needs to take up the controversial issue of human cloning at some point in time "and come to a position on it, which we haven't been able to get agreement even to get the debate up."
Among the three bioethics bills to be debated is the "Fetus Farming Prohibition Act" (S. 2504), which would make it a federal offense for researchers to use tissues from a human baby created and grown in a woman's or animal's womb for the express purpose of obtaining human tissues.
Then there is the "Alternative Pluripotent Stem Cell Therapies Enhancement Act" (S. 2754), which would support research to find methods of creating pluripotent stem cells -- those with the ability to turn into any kind of tissue -- without harming human embryos.
The other piece of bioethics legislation coming under discussion today is the "Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act" (H.R. 810 and S. 471), which would use tax dollars to fund the destruction of human embryos. This series of bills will, at the request of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, reach the Senate floor this week and will require 60 votes for passage.
Pro-Life Groups Take Issue With Bioethics Bills
The American Life League has issued a statement regarding its analysis of S. 2754, a bill the pro-life group says is supposed to spare human embryos from abuse but which actually allows for a technique that would create and kill human embryos. That technique, known as Altered Nuclear Transfer/Oocyte-Assisted Reprogramming (ANT/OAR), therefore fails to resolve the ethical concerns raised by those who oppose research on human embryos or on stem cells derived from them.
American Life League president Judie Brown says ANT/OAR "could be used to promote the creation and killing of disabled human embryos." But that is not the only reason she says her group is urging senators to vote against the Alternative Pluripotent Stem Cell Therapies Enhancement Act.
"Even if ANT itself were used in a manner that clearly did not produce a human embryo," Brown remarks, "it would almost certainly still be complicit in the exploitation of women by harvesting their eggs."
While the American Life League has come out strongly against the "alternative therapies" legislation, Concerned Women for America (CWA) is urging the Senate to support S. 2504, the proposed ban on creating fetuses to harvest their tissues for research, and to oppose federal funding for the destruction of embryos for research (H.R. 810/S. 471). Wendy Wright, CWA's president, says scientists should not be permitted to destroy human embryos, even for the "noble claim" of finding cures for diseases.
Wendy Wright | |
"We desire miraculous treatments," Wright comments, "but, as civilized people, not at the expense of human lives." The U.S. Senate has "an enormous opportunity this week," she says, "to determine how civilized we will be: Will our country condone and fund research that dismembers small human beings?" The CWA president warns that no "less-than-perfect person" in society should feel safe once the government begins deciding that some humans can be used as research material to benefit others. Meanwhile, the group's director of government relations, Lanier Swann, points out that embryonic stem-cell research, or ESCR, "has yet to yield one single success in human treatments" of disease or injury while the public has heard story after story of lives being changed through successful and ethically sound adult stem-cell treatments.
"Proponents of ESCR seem to think that destroying a human life to 'save' the life of another is a justifiable practice," Swann notes. But in reality, she says, "they are not saving either. The science speaks for itself."
It is "an irresponsible action," CWA's government relations director asserts, for the Senate to ask American taxpayers to fund a science that is "both immoral and ineffective." Instead, she says the senators must heed the "undeniable evidence" that adult stem-cell research is a giant leap forward in medicine while ESCR funding "continues to waste our money on the exploitation and destruction of little lives."
It is time, Swann insists, to recognize the truth about unproven and morally problematic embryonic stem-cell research and its ethical, clinically proven alternative, adult stem-cell research. And it is time, she adds, for the U.S. Senate "to vote to support a science that saves lives, not ends them."
