STATE’S POLITICIANS VOTE ANTI-FAMILY, PART 2
July 19th, 2006 by Peter
Both Senators Dodd and Lieberman voted for the bill to clone-and-kill human embryos, which President Bush plans to veto. The AP’s Focus on the Family quote accurately describes our President and our two U.S. Senators:
One conservative group, Focus on the Family Action, in Colorado Springs, Colo., praised Bush’s “uncommon character and courage in his defense of preborn,” while blasting senators who voted against Bush. “Some members of the Senate who should know better voted to destroy human lives — and that goes beyond cowardice.”
It is also a fair description of the process set in motion by our legislature:
As President Bush prepares to veto a bill the Senate passed Tuesday that would expand federal support of human embryonic stem cell research, dozens of Connecticut scientists – including several from Bush’s alma mater Yale University – have asked the state for $65 million, much of it for research the president opposes.
On Tuesday, the state committee charged with dispersing $20 million this year to promote stem cell research in Connecticut was told it had received more than 70 grant applications, including one that would make the University of Connecticut one of the top cloning centers.
Remember the claim that the state’s 2005 stem cell law bans cloning (they even put it in the bill’s title)? Now that the process has begun, the mask is off:
For instance, Xiangzhong “Jerry” Yang, director of the UConn Center for Regenerative Biology at Storrs, asked for $5 million to create human embryonic stem cells by somatic cell nuclear transfer, or cloning, and to support several other related research projects by scientists at both UConn and Yale. If the state approves funding for Yang’s proposal and the work is endorsed by a UConn ethics committee, Yang would join an international competition of scientists who want to be the first to use cloning to create human embryonic cells genetically identical to those of DNA donors.
But embryonic cells require the creation of a human embryo, followed by its destruction. This raises the moral specter of killing the unborn to improve or extend the lives of those now living.
Polls show the public supports embryonic stem-cell research. Gov. M. Jodi Rell, never one to miss a chance to couple her gubernatorial campaign to the public-opinion express train, called Monday for the Senate to approve the embryonic stem-cell measure, repeating the usual litany of diseases this research surely will cure someday and ignoring the epochal moral questions… Moreover, people might not be so anxious to have their tax dollars devoted to embryonic stem-cell research if they knew the facts.
As the Hudson Institute’s Michael Fumento reported on this page in April, adult stem cells “treat more than 80 human diseases while embryonics haven’t even made it to human testing.”
