The Wrong Legacy: A Cause Reagan Wouldn’t Have Supported (Draft executive order proves it)

The late, revered President Ronald Reagan is being enlisted in an all-out campaign to lift President Bush’s restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research. Even before President Reagan died on June 5, fifty-eight U.S. senators signed a letter asking President Bush to remove those restrictions. Now many of those senators, from Democrat Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) to Republican Orrin Hatch (Utah), are pointing to Reagan’s long illness and death as the perfect justification for why such research is needed.

But embryonic stem-cell research requires creating a human embryo and killing it. As President Bush recognizes, this raises profound moral objections. And what the embryonic research advocates are forgetting is that President Reagan strongly agreed with President Bush.

New York Times columnist William Safire, while invoking Reagan’s name to promote the cause of embryonic stem-cell research, writes that Reagan’s views on this will never be known. Well, that’s not so. A former White House assistant has given me a copy of a draft executive order that Reagan was working on shortly before he left office. The order would have “continue[d] and broaden[ed] the moratorium on NIH grants for certain types of fetal experimentation,” a moratorium put into effect in 1988 by an assistant secretary in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Reagan took a clear stand against research that would harm or destroy “any living child in utero,” in all stages of development in which scientists were then able to experiment on them.

And as Reagan’s national security adviser and close personal friend William Clark pointed out in the New York Times, “After the charter expired for the Departments of Health, Education and Welfare’s ethical advisory board—which in the 1970s supported destructive research on human embryos—he [that is, Reagan] began a de facto ban on federal financing of embryo research that he held to throughout his presidency.”

Clark knew his friend’s mind on this subject very well. “In his famous ‘Evil Empire’ speech of March 1983—which most recall as solely an indictment of the Soviet Union—Ronald Reagan spoke strongly against the denigration of innocent human life,” writes Clark. “And [Reagan] favored bills in Congress that would have given every human being—at all stages of development—protection as a person under the 14th Amendment.” Reagan also favored a Human Life Amendment which defines life as beginning at conception.

In addition, Clark points out, Reagan “would have asked the marketplace question: If human embryonic research is so clearly promising as the researchers assert, why aren’t private investors putting [their] money into it, as they are in adult stem-cell research?” The answer is obvious: Embryonic research is not only far less ethical than adult stem-cell research, but it’s also far less promising. Score another one for the Gipper.

It’s certainly understandable that Nancy Reagan, after the terrible ordeal she’s been through, might look with favor on any possibility of defeating Alzheimer’s. It’s even understandable that others, misled by extravagant promises and blind to what’s really going on, are grasping at the same straw. But they ought to argue their case on its merits—what few merits it has—and not enlist in their cause the name of Ronald Reagan, who stood foursquare against the exploitation and destruction of human life in any stage. That is one legacy he would have never wanted to leave.

In recent days, I've noticed that the some use the term 'fetal stem cells' when referring to the stem cells desired by the embryonic stem cell researchers. Those advocating the taking of stem cells from the embryo snap back that a) nobody is calling for fetuses to be killed for their cells, that b) the stem cells would be harvested from 'leftover embryos' at in vitro fertilization clinics, that c) utilizing their life for research would be preferred to 'wasting them'. The dismissive retort has several errors layered within it, to a moral person anyway.

1) Even at five days from conception, the newly conceived individual alive human has begun the process of constructing the body that human will occupy when exiting the uterine environment of his or her mother. Yes, the fetal body is only a few stem cells in size, but it is precisely because the body is so young that the experimenters want to get at those stem cells found inside the ball of actively dividing stem cells tasked with making the placenta organ of that new individual. Note please that the cells building the protective, support providing placental organ are the cells of the newly conceived individual, not the mother's cells, so the stem cells of the early placenta are as much the life of the embryo being expressed as the tiny start of specialized stem cells within that express the fetal body.

2) If the extraction of 'fetal' stem cells (as opposed to seeking placental stem cells of this new individual) happens to accidentally catch up one or two stem cells being tasked by the newly conceived life to build the placenta and umbilicus, a chaotic confusion will be seen under the microscopes (and if injected into an older individual, will build malignancies), as the stem cells seek to repair a damaged construction of placenta or umbilicus while confusedly trying to build the whole human body with slightly differentiated stem cells no longer active for producing all the tissues of the human body.
Posited another way, from the first evidence of cell division following conception, the newly conceived individual human makes stem cells that do a task, then have a slight change in 'readiness' to do all the following tasks for survival. Thus with cell division, the new individual human turns off an active signal but continues to transfer to next cells made the signals for tasks not yet accomplished.
The first action of the conceptus (developmentally) is to start stem cell differentiation that builds the placental organ which the new human will use for protection (a task of skin), for breathing (lung task of exchanging gasses), and for nourishment (the digestive system). Interestingly enough, some of the placental cells will actually be involved in formation and maintenance of the systems in the fetal body that will perform the similar tasks! Put another way, some of the cells that appear to be 'only fetal body cells' may still have active signals for umbilicus or placenta!

3) The humanity (alive organismal member of the human species) of the embryo is every bit as real as that of a pro-football player, though cell differentiation, size, function, etc. may not be as developed (to say the least). But since when do we categorize alive, less functional human beings as 'fair game for sacrificing at tissue sources' in the treatment of more functional human beings? [The notion of organ donation usually spews forth at this point, but the simple truth is, an older, more developed individual must give consent in order for their tissues and organs to be taken and 'being dead' is usually also a prerequisite unless the conscious individual is donating a kidney or bone marrow. There is a fundamental difference in a growing, able to actively-seek-survival human being and one in the last moments of life, so parents of frozen embryos ought not be donating their youngest children for dissection.]

4) With our football player alluded to above, that individual human being's LIFE is in his blood. How?... Well, even at his age and size and developed functionality, circulating in his blood stream are stem cells carrying the exact same life expression that began his lifetime! These stem cells go by various names and have different degrees of differentiation (the scientists call them totipotent, or pluripotent, or multipotent, depending on how many active signals have been turned off but are still carried within the stem cell). These stem cells are commonly titled 'adult stem cells'. But there is a rich source of these cells to be found in the placenta and placental blood left from a live birth, because the placenta is the organ built by the earliest ability of the individual human who came into existence at conception. Within that earliest organ, the life of the tiny individual was also to be found in his or her blood circulating in the placenta. There is one exceptional quality of that earliest blood, its generic nature ... the cells in the placenta are able to trick the mother's body into not rejecting the placenta and its contents as 'foreign tissue', yet the placenta and the fetal body growing within the placental organ ARE A DISTINCT DIFFERENT individual's tissues! Please forgive my constantly offering this same information in various expositions. I feel certain many have yet to hear these facts from the media so I try to pass it along when possible. Now to the abc's of the retort.

With a), we have a deception to divert attention from the truth, since the first stem cells separated from the growing placental mass that will build the fetus ARE the earliest body parts of the fetus! These earliest fetal stem cells will differentiate to form the three fundamental tissue types of the human body for the air world, and then further tissue lines will differentiate from those three lines. The 'plasticity' of these earliest stem cell body parts of the fetus is precisely why the researchers want to get at them. That plasticity is a feature not lost to the stem cells circulating in your blood now (your life is in your blood) because the apparent loss of that plasticity is accomplished by turning off signal points in your chromosomes, so someone someday is going to figure out how to turn the signals back on! And without killing embryos to take their less differentiated stem cells!! With b) and c) we have the age old plea to make use of those who are going to die soon or are already dying. We have the last century to prove the human tendency of 'wait until they are dying to get their tissues' easily turning into 'take the tissue at your convenience since they are destined for death'. Taking someone's tissues or organs without their consent is quite different from harvesting them when they no longer need them to sustain their life in the body. The plea of 'use them rather than waste them' has implicit in it the assumption that they are not 'human enough' or 'not yet a human being' by a strained definition that isn't scientific but is 'political' or 'cultural' ... and human cultural values vary hugely, some values of which we Americans have rejected, as with the evils of German and Japanese experiments on the Jews, the Chinese, gypsies, and prisoners.

The life of the individual human is in the blood of the individual, and the life is the same at the age of two cell embryo or one hundred cell embryo, as it is when butting heads on Sunday over a pig bladder (though they don't use those anymore, in favor of rubber and artificial fabrics). With adult stem cells, researchers will soon figure out how to reactivate the signals turned off when going from totipotent to pluripotent to multipotent. And we have a near unlimited supply of multipotent adult progenitor cells within each of our individual bodies ... and since they will come from the individual and be put back in the individual, they will be a perfect match for tissues, requiring no anti-rejection medications!

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.