By E. Christian Brugger

Obama’s win is a devastating loss for human embryos. True, no matter who won, embryos would have lost. Both candidates said repeatedly they supported federal funding for embryonic stem (ES) cell research. But McCain supported using only so-called ‘spare’ embryos earmarked for research purposes frozen at IVF clinics and otherwise opposed the intentional creation of human embryos for research purposes. And his repeated recent qualifications on his position (… “I believe clear lines should be drawn that reflect a refusal to sacrifice moral values and ethical principles for the sake of scientific progress.” “Recent scientific breakthroughs raise the hope that one day this debate will be rendered academic.” www.sciencedebate2008.com/www/index.php?id=42) led campaign watchers to predict that in the event of his unlikely success he may have turned right (that is, correct) and upheld the Bush ES cell policy.

Obama’s win seals a fate for embryos worse, I fear, than Roe did for fetuses in 1973. Why do I say this? A large part of basic scientific research in the US is funded by the National Institutes of Health, somewhere in the ballpark of 20 billion dollars per year. Excluding a type of research from federal funding is a long term kiss of death. True, killing ES cell research would be particularly onerous given the dedication of private financiers and reckless State spending initiatives such as California’s prop. 71,which earmarked 3 billion for State ES research. But supporting embryo destructive research with tax payer dollars would bring the research to a new level. It would facilitate the wide-scale institutionalization of human embryo creation for destructive purposes funded by the federal government. When Congress passed the Dickey-Wicker Amendment in 1996 banning the use of federal funds for research involving the creation or destruction of human embryos, the first human embryonic stem cells had not yet been successfully isolated. After biologist James Thomson first struck the dolorous blow in 1998, Dickey-Wicker rapidly became a marked amendment, like the embryos it protected.

To prevent the law being evaded by a slick executive trick passed in the waning days of the Clinton administration*, newly elected George W. Bush passed an executive order specifying that federal dollars were restricted to research on certain pre-approved stem cell lines created before August 2001. These federal provisions have prevented the creation and destruction of a lot of embryos over the past seven years.

Unfortunately, the fragile protections will soon be eliminated. Obama has vowed repeatedly to reverse President Bush’s restrictions on human embryo experimentation. He was an enthusiastic cosponsor of the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2007 (S. 5) intended to open funding for destructive embryo research on IVF embryos (“I stand in full support of the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act … I am proud to be an original cosponsor of this bill” 4/07.) (McCain supported it also.) And he voted against the 2007 HOPE Act (S 30), intended to fund intensive research exploration into alternative sources for deriving pluripotent stem cells without killing human embryos.

Moreover, it is fair to conclude that Obama will support human cloning for destructive research purposes. Although he has stated that he opposes human cloning, when pressed, he always qualifies his assertion to include only human cloning intended to bring to birth a live baby. To my knowledge, he has never said he opposes so-called ‘therapeutic cloning’ in which human embryos are created through somatic cell nuclear transfer exclusively for destructive research purposes. And in a questionnaire by the Chicago Medical Society in 2004 he stated that he opposed federal restrictions “on therapeutic stem cell research”, which has led some bioethics watchdog groups to conclude he supports human research cloning (http://bioethics.com/?page_id=4520).

We do not naturally identify with human embryos. Since ordinarily we do not see them, and when we do, their lack of humanoid appearance does not move our emotions, it is easy to conclude that they are not like the rest of us. But surely they are not different in any substantial way. Everyone reading this column was once an embryo. And if someone had destroyed you then, they would have destroyed YOU. “Embryo” is simply the name we give to human beings at their earliest stage of life. Like fetus, newborn, adolescent and adult, the term embryo indicates a phase in the development of a human being whose life began at fertilization (see Maureen Condic’s recent essay, When Does Human Life Begin? http://www.westchesterinstitute.net/ ). And at this stage, humans are utterly defenseless. Creating and destroying them is a terrible evil, even if many do not recognize it. Just as the emotions of many Americans remained unmoved for generations by chattel slavery, the emotional indifference towards the terrible harms to our embryonic brothers and sisters expresses no fundamental truth about their deficient value; rather, it is indicative of our emotional immaturity. This makes it all the more imperative that our generation of pro-life citizens speaks up on their behalf, especially as we anticipate an administration resolute in devaluing human embryos.

*In 2000 Clinton approved a set of guidelines permitting federal funds on stem cells derived from 'spare' embryos earmarked for disposal at fertility clinics.  Lawyers at Health and Human Services argued that the guidelines conformed to Dickey-Wicker if an embryo's destruction was funded by private money, in which case the NIH only would fund the subsequent research on the ES cells derived from the destroyed embryo.

**Obama has also vowed to repeal the Mexico City policy, which prohibits federal funding for international nongovernmental organizations that provide abortion services. He also supports the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which bars the use of federal funds to pay for abortions except in the cases of rape, incest and threat to the life of the mother.

See Robert P. George’s fine essay, Obama’s Abortion Extremism at

http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/viewarticle.php?selectedarticle=2008.10.14_George_Robert_Obama's%20Abortion%20Extremism_.xml

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E. Christian Brugger is an Associate Professor of Moral Theology at the Saint John Vianney Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado. He earned his D.Phil. in Christian Ethics from the University of Oxford. He also holds Masters degrees from Harvard Divinity School (moral philosophy) and Seton Hall University (moral theology).

He is the author of Capital Punishment and Roman Catholic Moral Tradition (Notre Dame Press, 2003) and has published widely on the topic of moral theology and philosophy in journals like The Thomist, National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, Josephenum Journal of Theology and Global Virtue Ethics Review.