Down to the wire: Pro-life help needed to block taxpayer funding of human embryo research
Pro-taxpayer funded embryonic stem cell research supporter Sen. Tom Harkin held a stacked (only 1 opponent allowed) pro-escr hearing today and said this, according to Bloomberg:
Congress will intervene if a U.S. court rules that federal funding for research using human embryonic stem cells is illegal, Senator Tom Harkin said….
Harkin, an Iowa Democrat and lead author of legislation to authorize federal dollars for the research, said he will take steps to work around any court setback for the policy established by President Barack Obama in March 2009.
Yes, that is indeed what Harkin said. Start listening at minute 23 on this video from today’s hearing.
This is good, meaning it appears unlikely legislation will be introduced in the Senate to force taxpayer funded escr until the court has made its decision whether Obama’s executive order is legal under current law.
One of our side’s talking points to congresspersons, which I’m told has resonated, is to let the court finish its work before they act, particularly since a decision on the Administration’s request for a stay could come as early as next week. The entire court case is expected to be decided this fall.
Our goal at this point is to get the autumn congressional clock to run out before the pro-escr legislation can be introduced.
Here, tentatively, are the remaining days the US House and Senate will be in session before recessing to campaign for the November elections. In other words, these are how many days we have to fend off this legislation:
September 16
September 21-24 (3-1/2 days)
September 28-30 and October 1 (3-1/2 days)
October 4-8 (4-1/2 days – as of now. News reports indicate Congress may scratch this week)
Don’t be discouraged by headlines like this, but don’t blow them off either:
In actuality, word is there is a debate raging among Democrats on the House side whether to introduce Diana DeGette’s pro-escr legislation. Read the 2nd paragraph of the aforementioned article and you’ll see the headline is merely DeGette’s wishful thinking, her continued bluff:
Rep. Diana DeGette of Denver said Democratic leaders in the House are looking favorably on the idea of moving a bill quickly to the floor in time for a vote before Congress recesses Oct. 8….
“The fact that people are running against these hard-right Tea Party candidates really will help them because the vast majority of Americans are for stem-cell research,” said DeGette, a longtime champion of the research….
DeGette is talking out of her butt, ‘scuse me. In actuality voter concern for fiscal responsibility has resulted in a stunning reversal in support for taxpayer-funded escr over the past 18 months. Now 57% of voters oppose it.
Your senator and congressperson need to hear from you. Refer to this 2010 ESCR Whip List for Rs and Ds to make your calls. The yellow highlighted names are the people to target 1st. The Democrat highlighted names are listed on the Cook Report as vulnerable.
One other point in our favor. DeGette’s legislation in the House, and Specter’s companion legislation in the Senate, are comprehensive. They allow funding for clone and kill and even for the creation of chimeras (animal/human combinations). They only ban implanting clones in uteruses. Even pro-escr legislators in the past have opposed this sort of all-encompassing legislation, as the linked Whip List indicates. (Asterisked names previously opposed this fairly identical legislation, what we call the “Phony Cloning Ban.”)
Needless to say, it appears likely the next session of Congress will be less amenable to this legislation, which DeGette knows, which is why she’s in a hurry.
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
I’m toally opposed to not allowing stem cells to be used for research and experimentation.This is wrong, and appallingly obscurantist. Anti-choicers claim that
stem cells will never yield any medical advances, but how do they know this?
Basically,they’re opposed because of their ludicrous belief that using stem cells is”destroying life”.Unbelievable.I can understand them being opposed to surgical abortions of partially formed fetuses, but to be opposed to using stem cells is not only foolish but insane.
America cannot allow this kind of backward and reactionarythinking to thwart vital scientific and medical research. If stem cells become illegal for scientists to use,what will be next?
In this supposedly advanced and enlightened age,it’s appalling to see people with these kind of medieval attitudes. This kind of stubborn,willful ignorance has no place in America or anywhere else today.
Robert Berger,
I may have missed something here, but I don’t think anyone is advocating the end of adult stem cell research. ASCR doesn’t kill human embryos, only ESCR does.
Robert, no one’s worried about merely destroying cells. At the current time, an embryonic human being is destroyed in order to OBTAIN those cells. There’s the problem.
Robert I found it very interesting the Dr. Oz had made a very interesting pronouncement to Oprah and to Michael J. Fox on her show a couple of years ago (as closely as I can recall he said) ” The exciting news is that the real cures are going to come from ADULT STEM CELLS AND CORD BLOOD CELLS, we don’t need to go through all this controversy regarding embryionic stem cells.” They both sat there dumbfounded and speechless especially Michael J. Fox, who has spent the last few years fighting for ESCR to cure his Parkinson’s Disease. Fox did not say “That is interesting I will look into it” He just sat there looking dumb. Dr. Oz’s friend Oprah has not even spent the time to check into the breakthroughs for adult stem cells and reporting this research on her show because she has been to busy being politically correct promoting Barack Obama (the poster child for the pro-abortion lobby) and promoting all of her Hollywood friends. Being aligned with the pro-abort cause makes you so enamored with justifying aborting “fetuses” and insisting “It isn’t a human life” that you cannot open up to the real progress that has already come from an alternative that doesn’t involve killing embryos and doesn’t bring any of this controversy about when life begins. It is more important to have the “right” to kill unborn babies than to do anything else to save lives. So sad.
Tom Harkin, 1 of Iowa’s biggest embarrassments & another “Catholic in Name Only”. I would have been surprized if the hearings hadn’t been stacked.
Robert, I am sorry to see that you have bought into the lies about stem cell research put out there by those who want embryonic research to go forward. They make it sound like there are no treatments or therapies out there. & that pro-lifers are totally opposed to stem cell research. That is a lie. Pro-lifers support the use of adult stem cells. As for treatments, the truth is that there are well over 70 different treatments/therepies already out there using adult stem cells.
What we oppose is the use of embryonic stem cells because of how they are harvested, by killing an unborn child.
As someone who works in medicine and has to be constantly on top of the latest research, I can safely say that based upon everything I have studied for the past ten years, embryonic stem cell research has yielded (and only will continue to yield) one thing:
Dead human beings.
It simply doesn’t work, as if that were the only reason not to do it. This debate is over.
Robert Berger September 16th, 2010 at 7:31 pm
“Anti-choicers claim that stem cells will never yield any medical advances, but how do they know this?”
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wattaberger,
I do not believe I have read any pro-lifer commenter who claimed that ‘”HUMAN”‘ embryonic stem cells would ‘never’ yield any medical advances.
This is a false charge used to divert the focus from the point of contention which is:
Is it morally and ethically correct to deliberately produce ‘”HUMAN”‘ embryos and then deliberately kill them in the hope of discovering information that might or might not prove beneficial in the treatment, prevention and cure of human diseases?
If you want to volunteer to be a human guinea, pig then by all means go for it, but do not volunteer others to be subjected to what you are not willing to subject yourself.
You are all about killing someone else to calm your irrational fears about overpopulation, but you have never expressed a willingness to eliminate yourself to make one personal contribution to solving a problem which appears to vex you so much.
Do you consider yourself one of the ‘more than equals’ that are indisposable?
You cannot be unaware that researchers have been destroying ‘”HUMAN”‘ ESC’s for years, with or without government funding, and have not yet come up with any treatment, prevention or cure for anything.
The government and privately funded reseach using ‘”HUMAN”‘ adult stem cells has produced beneficial results that have contributed to the treatment, prevention and cure of diseases.
Robert, the debate here is on TAXPAYER FUNDED human embryo experimentation. PRIVATELY FUNDED human embryo experimentation is not being held up whatsoever. Go fund it yourself.
@Robert Berger & all of the rest of the “choicers” & “planned peoplekillers”;
Lead by example. Offer up your own bodies for experimentation.
Experimenting on cells is not “murder”.To call it this is just plain ludicrous.
This reminds me of a hilarious scene from The Family Guy, where Brian the dog’s
beautiful but dim-witted girlfriend offers lemonade to him and a guest and says sadly,”It’s so sad that so many lemons had to die in order to make this”.
Robert Berger September 16th, 2010 at 7:31 pm
“America cannot allow this kind of backward and reactionarythinking to thwart vital scientific and medical research. If stem cells become illegal for scientists to use,what will be next?” [In Nazi Germany, it would have been you.]
In this supposedly advanced and enlightened age,it’s appalling to see people with these kind of medieval attitudes. This kind of stubborn,willful ignorance has no place in America or anywhere else today. [Look in the mirror and recite these words to yourself.]
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From an article in the New Englan Journal of Medicine written by Leo Alexander, M.D. (October 11, 1905 – July 20, 1985) medical investigator for Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson and an aide to the chief counsel at the Nuremberg war crimes trials.
“Irrespective of other ideologic trappings, the guiding philosophic principle of recent dictatorships, including that of the Nazis, has been Hegelian in that what has been considered “rational utility” and corresponding doctrine and planning has replaced moral, ethical and religious values.”
“The case, therefore, that I should like to make is that American medicine must realize where it stands in its fundamental premises. There can be no doubt that in a subtle way the Hegelian premise of “what is useful is right” has infected society, including the medical portion.”
Robert Berger September 16th, 2010 at 7:31 pm
“America cannot allow this kind of backward and reactionarythinking…
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I have noticed that marxists, socialists and liberals habitually refer to people who reject their materialistic chatter as ‘counter revoltutionary or reactionary.’
The words that they are wont to use reveal the cause of their willfull ignorance.
Marxists are not born. They are shaped by inculcation and indoctrination.
Most are predisposed to the atheistic ideology because they have suffered some sort of injustice and have been able to get past it. They refuse to forgive the one(s) who wounded them and they often cannot even forgive themselves.
They are bitter an angry people who walk around with a chip on their shoulder constantly and deliberately bumping into other folks and then blaming them for not respecting their space.
Robert,
Nobody in the pro-life community is opposed to adult stem cell research.
Tearing apart a human embryo is tearing apart a new human organism in its earliest developmental stages. This is NOT, I REPEAT, NOT a pro-life construct, but an established scientific fact.
Every major textbook in embryology has identified the zygote (the single-celled embryo) as a new human organism, a new human being, a new human life:
http://gerardnadal.com/2010/01/07/more-from-the-scientific-community-on-the-identity-and-status-of-the-human-embryo/
It follows, therefore, that tearing apart a human embryo is the tearing apart of a new human life. Again, that’s NOT a pro-life construct, but a conclusion that logically follows the ontological and biological reality the field of embryology has presented to us. If you have a problem with that, then I submit that it is YOU who are the anti-science clock stopper on this thread.
Embryonic stem cells are too unstable and induce tumors in every animal model tested, while adult stem cells have produced hundreds of therapies. They are now using endometrial stem cells from menstrual blood of primary relatives to inject into the muscles of patients with Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy and restoring muscle function.
That’s just one of hundreds of ASC applications. It is a disgrace, a criminal disgrace that pro-aborts such as yourself INSIST on funding this losing ESC technology to the tune of Billions of dollars while you disregard the cells that are providing the cures you seek from the utterly unstable ESC’s.
Admit it Robert, you are so cravenly pro-abortion that you will squander Billions on ESC’s in a futile attempt to buttress Roe v Wade by fostering a utilitarian disregard for the embryonic humans being torn to shreds. You really care little for cures, or else you would be castigating the idiot legislators looking to burn our money on a loser technology.
The ESC crew continues to keep most ASC therapies offshore and out of reach of most Americans all because they want their sex without consequences.
You sir have no idea of just how ignorant you sound. And Jill is right, this is about taxpayer funding of a losing proposition. I would add that the reason industry isn’t putting up the money is because they have no prospect of any return on such investments in ESC’s. Meanwhile, the ASC’s overseas are getting all sorts of private investments, because they’ve been producing viable results for over two decades now.
I’ll repeat one point here because it’s vital as a take-home message. The war against ASC’s by the ESC crew constitutes the true war on therapeutic advancement.
You’ve just been hoisted on your own petard.
RB:
Your assignment is to read and reread Nadal’s comments. Of course you believe you are correct, so why challenge yourself with opposing viewpoints? The answer is simple: because you may learn something.
The difference between ASCR which has yielded miracle therapies, and ESCR which has shown zero success is monumental. I have a suggestion for those who want to bet on ESCR–stay away from casinos and horse races.
Seriously, support for ESCR appears to be ideologically driven. In many ways as a society we behave as narcissistic adolescents. We want what we want and we want it now–to heck with the costs or the consequences. We are not about to be deterred by annoyances–especially from those who caution against our desires. Our emotionally fragile makeup leads us from one false utopia to another. Sometimes it takes the form of following false messiahs, at other times it is expressed in hero worship of rock stars or so called “successful” wealth accumulators, and at times it can take on involving ourselves in perverted and harmful behaviors. It certainly manifests itself in a lack of empathy toward others (hence the indignation at the thought that this measly little embryonic cell is human). At all times this narcissism stunts emotional and intellectual growth.
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