There was a fantastic article about this issue last year that changed my mind completely, but The Spectator site seems to be down at the moment. I'll post it here when it is restored.
Posted on 09/28/2002 4:53:14 PM PDT by SBeck
When Nancy Reagan received the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House last summer, she cast her eyes demurely downward as President Bush praised her 1980's "Just Say No," campaign against teenage drug use.
Mr. Bush did not cite Mrs. Reagan's current and far more divisive cause ? federal financing for embryonic stem cell research, which anti-abortion groups oppose. Last year Mr. Bush sharply limited such research. At 81, the former first lady is obliquely but persistently campaigning ? through friends, advisers, lawmakers and her own well-placed calls and letters ? to reverse the president's decision.
Mrs. Reagan believes that embryonic stem cell research could uncover a cure for Alzheimer's, the disease that has wiped out her husband's memory. She was dismayed, friends say, when the White House took issue on Monday with a new California law that encourages embryonic stem cell research.
Her advisers say Mrs. Reagan's sense of decorum and party loyalty inhibit her from publicly challenging a Republican president.
Instead, she is expressing her frustration through emissaries.
"A lot of time is being wasted," she told a friend last week who was given permission to pass her words on to The New York Times. "A lot of people who could be helped are not being helped."
Mrs. Reagan's dispute with Mr. Bush is complicated by the long, rather strained history between their families. The Reagans had a famously civil but cool relationship with Vice President George Bush and his wife, Barbara.
The Bushes' eldest son, George W., who in 1986 left his Texas oil business to work on his father's presidential campaign, witnessed an icy distance that did not melt even after the Reagans left Washington and George and Barbara Bush moved into the Executive Mansion.
The current President Bush has worked hard to charm the woman who has become an icon of Republican nostalgia. In July, Mrs. Reagan spent two nights at the White House in the Queen's Bedroom, a pink and white room usually reserved for visiting royalty. At her arrival, the Bushes gathered all the White House servants who had worked for the Reagans and held an intimate dinner with her the night before the award ceremony.
"She really likes George W.," Frederick J. Ryan Jr., chairman of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, said. Mr. Ryan, who gave a large dinner for Mrs. Reagan after she received her medal, added, "I think she sees him as emulating Ronald Reagan's presidential style. She sometimes calls me when someone has been critical of him and says, `What are we going to do about this?' "
But Mrs. Reagan, whose stepfather and stepbrother were neurosurgeons, dissents on the subject of stem cell research.
Bob Colacello, a Vanity Fair writer who is working on a biography of Mrs. Reagan, said, "In the four years that I have been working on the book, I have never seen or heard her talk about a policy issue ? except stem cell research."
Scientists contend that embryonic stem cells, which can form any of the body's cell types, will one day be used to treat many diseases. But researchers must destroy human embryos to get the cells, and that is why anti-abortion groups oppose the work and Mr. Bush restricted federal financing for it last year.
Mrs. Reagan voiced concerns about the president's policy on stem cell research with the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., at the dinner party in her honor, an aide to Mr. Card said. But her friends say it is unlikely she would have breached etiquette by raising the issue with Mr. Bush while a guest in his house.
Direct confrontation was never her style. In the Reagan White House, Mrs. Reagan was a stealth first lady who pursued her husband's political and personal agenda behind the scenes, using her network of friends and advisers to lobby decision-makers or leak information to the news media.
Now Mrs. Reagan is a stealth lobbyist, working her old network to once again wield influence in Washington. She has personally contacted 20 members of Congress, button-holed administration officials and conferred with leading scientists, including Dr. Richard D. Klausner, who resigned as director of the National Cancer Institute last September and now runs the global health program of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
"Mrs. Reagan has been very helpful in talking to members about the use of stem cells," said Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, who is seeking to resurrect legislation to authorize so-called therapeutic cloning, a type of stem cell research that also involves the destruction of embryos. "She's a former first lady, she holds a special position because of her own persuasive personality, and her husband, President Reagan, has Alzheimer's. She's a triple threat."
Her mobilizing is bipartisan. Mrs. Reagan has even discussed the issue with Warren Beatty, a liberal Democrat.
Last year Mrs. Reagan wrote to Mr. Bush, saying she hoped that sparing other families what hers had suffered could be part of her husband's legacy. She then entrusted two advisers to show it to influential Republican legislators. On the eve of Mr. Bush's decision last year, she instructed an ally, veiled under the stiff euphemism, "people familiar with Mrs. Reagan's feelings," to inform reporters that she had communicated her views on stem cell research to Mr. Bush.
Last Wednesday, frustrated scientists testified before Congress that the president's restrictions had stymied stem cell research, or as Dr. George Q. Daley of the Whitehead Institute in Boston put it, threatened to "starve the field at a time when greater nourishment is critical."
That evening, Mrs. Reagan appeared on the CBS program "60 Minutes II" in a taped interview with Mike Wallace, 84, who has known her since the 1940's. Mrs. Reagan told Mr. Wallace that her husband no longer seemed to recognize her. She spoke eloquently of her loneliness, but she did not discuss her anger.
"I didn't know or I would have asked her," Mr. Wallace said after the interview was broadcast, referring to Mrs. Reagan's efforts on behalf of embryonic stem cell research. "But she is always reluctant to do anything that could be perceived as anti-Republican."
Mr. Wallace said he was surprised that Mrs. Reagan replied "Yes," when he called to ask if he could relate her views to a Times reporter. Mr. Wallace said that a few minutes later she called him back and added her concern that time in the search for a cure to Alzheimer's was being wasted.
The White House responded delicately. "A great many good-hearted people have strong feelings about this," Adam Levine, a spokesman, said. "The president is confident that the decision he made last year strikes the right balance between moral and ethical responsibility and furthering scientific research."
As first lady, Mrs. Reagan was not always popular; White House aides feared her, and even many Republicans were put off by her preoccupation with fashion, high society and astrology.
Her reclusive, unswerving devotion to her husband has mollified her detractors. Once Mr. Reagan fell ill, Mrs. Reagan stopped going to parties. She now rarely leaves her Bel Air mansion and allows no visitors. Mrs. Reagan told Mr. Wallace that her life was lonely.
"Because really, you know, when you come right down to it, you're in it alone. And there's nothing that anybody can do for you."
Her oldest friends, however, have joined her campaign against the disease that has stricken her husband.
A Republican legislator recently told Michael Deaver, a Reagan adviser and confidant, that some conservatives contend that Ronald Reagan would never have approved of embryonic stem cell research. Mr. Deaver said he retorted, "Ronald Reagan didn't have to take care of Ronald Reagan for the last 10 years."
Rational discussion encouraged, puerile nonsense ignored, fire away.
George W. Bush believes, as do I, that embryos are human beings.
Go ahead justify it and then imagine telling this courageous woman your rationalization. Mike Deaver's comment at the end is dead on and for those of you who are caretakers my heart goes out to you.
If harvesting the brains from living, but terminal, human beings could cure Alzheimer's, would you favor it?
Life is not fair, and nobody is going to cheat death.
The press has been nearly silent about the horrifying results of many stem cell experiments. Bad science.
Same here. I can't justify abortion for this either, no matter how much I wish for a cure.
If we say that embryos are 'nonviable' and therefore have no right to life, how do we avoid saying that people with Alzheimer's are viable and still have a right to life?
Embryos have the potential to develop into healthy, productive human beings with long life spans. Alzheimer's victims do not have this potential, regardless of the legal status of stem cell research.
Perhaps we should be talking about performing medical research on Alzheimer's victims, to study how we might improve the lives of embryos.
Does that sound cruel? Well, it is equally cruel to sacrifice the babies for the old people. And our society is the first society in human history to conceive of doing just that. We've come a long way from the decks of the Titanic, where millionaires allowed children from steerage to take their places on the lifeboats.
There was a fantastic article about this issue last year that changed my mind completely, but The Spectator site seems to be down at the moment. I'll post it here when it is restored.
Yours is an assertion that may or may not be correct. The certainty with which you make it is fatuous.
I am unaware of the administration attempting to obstruct use of placental/umbilical or adult-derived stem cells; while the latter don't seem as promising yet, from what I understand the former have enormous potential and are available in sufficient quantities to actually do some good.
Beyond the moral difficulties of harvesting stem cells from embryos which were conceived for exactly that purpose [if any therapies based on such cells take off, that's exactly what would happen] there are serious questions about the 'reliability' of such cells. Stem cells taken from the placenta/umbilical cord of a healthy baby can be considered to be pretty well "genetically pre-screened"; if the baby is apparently healthy, there can't be anything too much wrong with it genetically. On the other hand, a significant portion of embryos have very serious genetic defects which would prevent them from developing into a healthy baby. Trying to use stem cells from such an embryo may have disastrous consequences.
Maybe, but that is not a reason to not do the research.
You obviously do not believe embryos to be human beings.
Since you don't, you're not going to get concurrence from those of us who believe they are.
Bush is only cutting off federal funding for this research. You are free to fund as much of this as your checkbook will allow.
From what I've read, umbilical/placental stem cells appear to have the same promise as embryonic ones, in addition to being inherently "genetically pre-screened" and being available in more usable quantities than embryonic ones.
To me those factors would suggest that research in that direction would be more useful than research with embryonic stem cells. Am I wrong in my thinking somewhere?
Does that sound cruel? Well, it is equally cruel to sacrifice the babies for the old people. And our society is the first society in human history to conceive of doing just that. We've come a long way from the decks of the Titanic, where millionaires allowed children from steerage to take their places on the lifeboats.
VERY well said.
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