"... scientific and practical barriers to the medical use of embryonic stem cells have loomed larger, while non-embryonic stem cells have moved quickly into promising clinical trials for a wide array of conditions. Yet many researchers have responded by simply abandoning NBAC's approach of treating embryo research as a last resort. Instead, their claim is that research using both embryonic and non-embryonic stem cells should be fully funded now, to determine which source is best for various functions.
This approach simply reduces "respect" for the embryo to nothing at all. For that is the approach one would take if there were no moral problem whatever -- if the only factor determining our research priorities were relative efficiency at achieving certain goals. "Respect" must mean, at a minimum, that we are willing to give up some ease and efficiency in order to obey important moral norms instead of transgressing them.
Interestingly, the principle of respect for human life at the embryonic stage has fared better in the more representative branches of government, among policymakers who lack graduate degrees in ethics but have a keener sense of public moral sentiment. The NIH panel's recommendations were partly rejected by President Clinton (who refused to fund experiments requiring the creation of embryos for research purposes), then completely rejected by Congress, which banned funding of any harmful experiments on preimplantation human embryos. In effect, Congress decided to treat the embryo as a human subject, to be protected from research risks as fully as the unborn child in the womb has been since 1975. Congress's provision has been reenacted every year since 1996 through annual appropriations bills, with an amendment since 1998 to ensure that embryos produced by cloning are protected.20
Some states have gone further, prohibiting harmful experiments on human embryos outright regardless of the source of funding.21 In one state, Louisiana, the embryo produced by IVF is protected as a juridical person – a standard that not only forbids harmful research, but also limits clinics' ability to perform any intervention unless it is designed to serve the embryo's opportunity for survival and live birth. The most recent state law on embryo research generally, enacted in South Dakota in 2002, also prohibits stem cell research using stem cells that one knows were obtained by destroying human embryos. In our view, laws like those in Louisiana and South Dakota are the best current examples of how respect for the life of the human embryo should influence public policy on embryo research.
Is a policy of funding embryonic stem cell research consistent with the principle of respect for embryonic human life? When the NIH proposed such funding during the Clinton administration in 1999, it was argued that researchers would not be causing any net loss of life because the "spare" embryos from fertility clinics "would have been discarded anyway" – the policy would influence only how the embryo dies rather than whether it dies.22 One is tempted to observe that this is true of any and all killing of mortal creatures. Such a justification could certainly have horrendous implications for lethal experimentation on terminally ill patients or death-row prisoners. In the realm of fetal research, federally funded researchers are barred by law from using the "will die soon anyway" defense to do harmful research on the unborn child intended for abortion (or the child dying outside the womb from an abortion).23 In any case, the final NIH guidelines issued in 2001 were not restricted to embryos slated for discarding – they extended to any embryo deemed "in excess of clinical need," which only means that the parents do not need that embryo to reproduce at the present time.24 Many of these embryos are kept in frozen storage and eventually transferred to a womb later (if they are not requisitioned for destructive research first). A recent study by the fertility industry concluded that fewer than 3% of the embryos now in frozen storage are available for research; the NIH guidelines would have encouraged researchers to press parents to choose this option more often.25
Still others have argued that by funding embryonic stem cell research, the government is not complicit in any destruction of embryos because the research only occurs after the embryos are destroyed. Yet Congress since 1996 has banned federal funding of any research "in which" embryos are harmed or destroyed, and it is difficult to see how embryo destruction is anything but an integral and essential first step in any embryonic stem cell research project. The Clinton administration's argument that such destruction and the use of the resulting cells were completely separate activities was criticized as hypocritical and evasive even by supporters of federal funding.26 Offering funds for research projects that rely on the destruction of embryos encourages such destruction to be done.
The policy articulated by President Bush on August 9, 2001 is a more subtle and complex matter. The President's stated goal was to promote the possible benefits of embryonic stem cell research without encouraging future destruction of human embryos. Therefore, he said, federal funds would only support research using cell lines already created by destroying embryos in the past.
The limited number of cell lines that the Bush Administration approved for federally funded research is meant to be adequate only for basic research, designed to determine the most promising avenues for further exploration. Some researchers have complained that the currently eligible cell lines are of insufficient volume for treatments (on the assumption that treatments will ever emerge), have inadequate genetic diversity to treat most of the patients who may want cell implants, and might be inappropriate for human transplantation because they are grown in cultures of mouse feeder cells.27 It is important to recognize, however, that ultimately these researchers will want to develop thousands of cell lines with different genetic profiles -- or develop human cloning, to create and destroy embryos that are a genetic "match" to each individual patient.
Recently a campaign was launched to reverse the current policy and authorize funding for research on new embryonic stem cell lines, cultured without the use of mouse feeder cells. Proponents have said that this expansion is necessary to take advantage of new advances in the use of embryonic stem cells. On closer examination, however, it turns out that the only advances cited are simply advances in growing the stem cells without mouse feeder cells.28 No breakthroughs have occurred to indicate that embryonic stem cells are ready or almost ready for clinical use. Use of new cell lines from frozen embryos has not been shown to be necessary for current basic research, and would still be completely inadequate for any large-scale clinical research – suggesting that the proposed policy expansion is itself a transitional step toward mass-producing embryos (by cloning or other means) solely for harmful experimentation.29 Oddly, the new cells proposed as a medium for growing embryonic stem cells are human bone marrow cells, which have themselves shown great clinical promise in both animal and human trials. Thus when the new mixture of adult and embryonic cells is transplanted into a patient, any clinical benefits may well arise from the adult cells -- but would be attributed by embryo researchers to the embryonic stem cells, and used to argue in favor of funding even more embryo destruction. This campaign illustrates that to some proponents, preferentially advancing research that relies on the destruction of embryonic human life has become virtually an end in itself.
Some view the Bush administration policy itself as a transitional policy. If new advances arise using existing embryonic stem cell lines (or from research in the private sector using new cell lines), political pressure will likely increase for expanding the policy and involving the government in active and direct support for the destruction of developing human life. If those advances do not come forward, or are rendered less relevant by more rapid advances using non-embryonic cells, interest in funding research on embryonic stem cell lines will likely fade, as occurred in the case of research using fetal tissue from abortions some years ago. In the meantime, however, the danger is that scarce research funds will have been diverted to the most morally problematic and medically oversold avenues of investigation.
In vitro fertilization itself has also come under closer scrutiny in recent years because it has produced so many "spare" embryos whose fate is now uncertain. More generally, IVF has given rise to a mentality in which human lives can be subjected to "quality control," selective discarding, intentional overproduction, and "selective reduction" (abortion) when more embryos than expected begin to develop in the womb. In addition, a growing body of evidence has begun to document an increased rate of serious birth defects among children conceived by IVF, and especially those conceived by particular IVF procedures such as intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI).30 For all these reasons, efforts to promote the value of respect for human life in its earliest stages should include efforts to help move our society away from use of IVF as a reproductive procedure."