An End to Government's Role in Embryo-Destructive Research? As President Bush Considers Embryonic and Fetal Research, New Findings Support His Pro-Life Stance.

(February 8, 2001) - - President George W. Bush spent an impressive first weekday in office. On January 22, Mr. Bush issued a statement of support to March for Life attendees and reversed Bill Clinton's policy of promoting abortion overseas.

His next pro-life challenge may be to take on the Clinton Administration's ongoing plans for destructive human embryo research.

At issue are National Institutes of Health (NIH) guidelines, published in final form in August, authorizing taxpayer funding of research that requires killing human embryos for their "stem cells." With swift action by the Bush Administration, these guidelines can still be rescinded before federal funds are disbursed for destructive research this spring.

Where the Policy Debate Stands

Since 1996, Congress has banned federal funding for research in which human embryos are harmed or destroyed. (The law is called the Dickey Amendment - - see sidebar page 9.) But once researchers announced progress in culturing stem cells from human embryos in November 1998, the Clinton Administration developed a scheme to evade this law.

Based on a legal opinion by Health and Human Services attorney Marcy Wilder (former legal director of the National Abortion Rights Action League), the NIH proposed funding research that uses stem cells from "spare" embryos at fertility clinics. These are live human embryos created in the lab by in vitro fertilization for reproductive purposes, whose parents no longer want them.

In the guidelines, the NIH instructs researchers on how to obtain and kill these embryos to obtain their stem cells, in order to obtain federal grants for the research on those stem cells. The guidelines simply assert that federal funds do not pay for the killing of the embryos, even though the killing can be arranged or even performed by the federally funded researcher (and the embryos must be killed in the government-approved manner, of course).