STEM CELLS: Holding the Lines.(Brief Article)

To be a social conservative leader in modern America can be a thankless task. You must uphold truths that were so long accepted that they are no longer well understood. A conservative politician must perforce be, to some extent, a moral teacher. The task of teaching is made more difficult by the fact that we lack not just a social consensus on moral controversies, but the shared vocabulary to address those controversies. This year's debate over stem-cell research has amply demonstrated the point. President Bush's difficulty was not merely that many people do not accept the moral case against killing human embryos for research purposes; it was that they did not even find that case intelligible. So President Bush had to announce, explain, and justify his decision, but he had also to do something more: to draw the vast, ambivalent, inattentive public into a process of moral reasoning about a topic with which almost nobody is familiar.

He largely succeeded, although neither the decision nor the speech was entirely satisfactory. Bush's decision was to allow federal funding for research on stem-cell lines that had already been taken from embryos- but not funding for research on stem cells that might be taken from embryos in the future. This policy is morally defensible. It accepts past evils (the already accomplished embryo killings) without in any way depending on or encouraging future evils.

It is, all the same, not the ideal policy. We would have preferred no taxpayer funding of research on stem cells and-even more important-a ban on the killing of embryos, whatever the purpose and whether financed by the public or private sector. But we recognize that had Bush ruled out any public funding, let alone sought a ban on private embryonic-stem-cell research, Congress would have ignored him. By cooling ...