California (now in dire financial straits) committed three billion dollars to ESCR.
The disgraced former Governor of New Jersey, James McGreevey, established the state-funded Stem Cell Institute of New Jersey with tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds. Even in 2008, Massachusetts authorized one billion taxpayer dollars to fund ESCR.
They have produced nothing, not one damn thing, of therapeutic value, and yet those are funds that truly promising Adult Stem Cell rsearchers are NOT going to get.
But the point is, anyone--- individual, University, States, investment consortium, privately-financed research lab, whoever --- was free to pursue ESCR as long as federal funds were not involved.
The MSM says Bush "banned" it merely because he declined to fund it, limiting FEDERAL funding to already-existing embryo-sourced cell lines (still morally obejectionable, but it didn't involve victimizing newly begotten humans.)
Thanks for pointing that out. So Obama is now removing the ban on federal funding, using the same method that Bush used to begin it: executive order.
Your point is that there was never a total ban on embryonic stem cell research, provided it was paid for with non-federal sources But this fact illustrates my other point: If you want to outlaw the research altogether, you would have to get Federal legislation passed, or a Constitutional amendment regarding human life beginning at conception.