Cellular division

A mixture of the personal and the political makes the stem-cell debate a minefield for Bush

By Dan Kennedy

Sometime in the next few weeks — possibly by July 23, when he is scheduled to meet with Pope John Paul II — George W. Bush will decide whether to allow federal funding of research on stem cells that have been removed from human embryos.

The decision will help define Bush’s presidency, if only by the enemies he’ll make. If he approves funding, thus affirming a decision Bill Clinton made last year, he’ll alienate the anti-choice religious right, which makes up his base, and conservative Catholics, whom he hopes to add to that base. If he rejects funding, then he will earn the contempt not just of scientific, technological, and business interests, but also of some powerful Republican senators who have unexpectedly come out in its favor, including minority leader Trent Lott of Mississippi, Orrin Hatch of Utah, and Connie Mack of Florida.

The battle over stem cells serves as a proxy for the larger cultural divide over

abortion rights. First isolated in 1998, stem cells are the human body’s earliest, most primitive cells. They are what scientists call “undifferentiated” — that is, they can grow into almost any type of cell, be it nerve, blood, liver, or skin. This malleability has led to the hope that stem cells could form the basis of miraculous new treatments for diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and certain types of diabetes and arthritis, to name just a few.

Unfortunately for proponents, the best (though not the only) source of stem cells is human embryos, the unwanted byproducts of in vitro fertilization, stored and frozen in laboratories throughout the country. Those who support stem-cell research argue, logically enough, that these embryos will eventually be discarded. Why not put them to good use? But anti-abortion-rights absolutists counter that because extracting stem cells destroys the embryos, it is the moral equivalent of abortion.

To judge from most media reports, public support for stem-cell research and for federal funding of it are overwhelming. For instance, a recent poll jointly conducted by ABC News and the religious Web site Beliefnet showed that 58 percent of respondents support research and just 30 percent oppose it; government funding was backed by a margin of 60 percent to 31 percent. Research was even supported by traditionally anti-choice constituencies such as evangelical white Protestants (50 percent to 40 percent) and white Catholics (54 percent to 35 percent).

But, as is frequently the case with polls, the answers depend on how the questions are phrased. For instance, a survey conducted recently by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops found that respondents oppose by a margin of 70 percent to 24 percent federal funding of stem-cell research if it requires destroying human embryos.

Thus the debate over stem-cell research approximates the cultural divide that resulted in last November’s virtually tied election. the stem cell wars: embryo research vs. pro-life politics is how Newsweekýput it in a recent cover story. And though the unexpected support of anti-choice stalwarts such as Hatch shows that the battle lines don’t break down neatly into blue-state/red-state camps, the dispute nevertheless shows the difficulty of coming to a social consensus on complicated moral, ethical, and scientific questions — especially when abstract political and religious ideas clash with painfully personal considerations.

The Republican Party’s most disastrous modern moment was its 1992 convention, when Pat Buchanan delivered a hatemongering speech that liberal columnist Molly Ivins later quipped sounded better in the original German. Buchanan oozed revulsion toward lesbians and gay men; and as more than one commentator noted at the time, that was too much even for the conservative delegates who attended the convention. After all, plenty of families have gay and lesbian members. Even delegates who opposed gay rights didn’t want to see their children, their siblings, or their cousins spat upon and discriminated against. Buchanan’s speech cost the GOP the 1992 and ’96 presidential elections, and is still cited as a prime example of right-wing intolerance.

The same mixture of the personal and the political is what makes the stem-cell debate so perilous for Bush today. Reportedly, during a debate rehearsal last fall, Bush was asked by an Al Gore stand-in how he could oppose federal research funds when his own sister had died of leukemia. Bush’s response: inarticulate anger. The real Gore would only have added to his reputation as a preening bully if he had asked such a question; but the fact is that just about all of us have family members who could benefit from stem-cell research, and a lot of us, regardless of our views on abortion rights, are more concerned about helping the living than about the potential of a clump of days-old cells to grow into a human being. Balancing the personal and the political has proven difficult even inside the Bush White House: according to this past Sunday’s New York Times, chief-of-staff Andrew Card’s father died of Parkinson’s disease, and his mother died of Alzheimer’s. In addition, Republican icon Ronald Reagan suffers from Alzheimer’s, and the Times reported that old Reagan friends such as Kenneth Duberstein are pushing for federally funded research.

A number of celebrities and media figures also support federal funding. Christopher Reeve, puffing into his air-powered wheelchair, speaks out regularly. So does Michael J. Fox, who has Parkinson’s disease, and Mary Tyler Moore, who has diabetes. Among the news media, Morton Kondracke, of Roll Call and the Fox News Channel, has written a well-received book, Saving Milly, on his wife’s heart-rending battle with Parkinson’s. Kondracke is using his book tour and media prominence to make the case for stem-cell research. Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, who went to medical school and who uses a wheelchair and who thus has a more sophisticated understanding of the medical system than most people, has written in favor of federal funding. So has the New York Times’ William Safire, who heads a foundation on brain science.

In fact, it’s hard to imagine anyone who doesn’t know and love someone who couldn’t be helped by stem-cell research. My almost-nine-year-old daughter, Rebecca, has achondroplasia, the most common form of dwarfism. Now, dwarfism is not a terrible fate by any means, and in fact could even be considered within the normal range of genetic variation. But dwarfs can also suffer from related medical problems, some serious, and from social discrimination as well. If stem-cell research could have produced a safe, reliable treatment for Becky, my wife and I would have opted for it in a moment. (Further disclosure: the education Becky’s dwarfism has given us also led us to invest in a stem-cell-research company whose stock price would almost certainly rise if Bush approved federal funding.)

This personal argument was well put by Michael Kinsley in Slate last year, shortly after Clinton had approved federal funding. “Imagine being paralyzed by a spinal cord injury in your teens,” he wrote, “watching for decades as medical treatment progresses but not quite fast enough, and knowing that it could have been faster.”

In the face of such compelling reasons to support federal funding of stem-cell research, opponents have voiced two basic lines of argument — one moralistic, the other pragmatic.

The moralistic argument is essentially the one voiced by the Catholic Church and the religious right. For scientists to experiment on human stem cells, the pope has said, is “not morally acceptable, even when their proposed goal is good in itself.” The absolutism turns the appeals made by the likes of Christopher Reeve on their head. Indeed, in hearings on proposed research last year, members of the US Senate heard not only from Reeve, but also from Mary Jane Owen, director of the National Catholic Office of Persons with Disabilities, who is blind and mostly deaf, and who uses a wheelchair.

“Do I want to see again? Dance again? Hear like I once did? I do not want those things at the cost of any living person, and I consider live embryos to be people,” Owen testified, according to a report on Wired.com.

This position at least has the virtue of logical consistency, and interest groups such as the Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family, the National Right to Life Committee, and the Republican National Coalition for Life are all pressuring Bush to take their side. Recently they were joined by House Republican leaders Dick Armey, Tom DeLay, and J.C. Watts, who made it clear that they don’t care what their Senate counterparts think. What these opponents miss, though, is that most of us have long since leaýned to live with ambiguity in the great pro-choice/pro-life debate. A culture that is reasonably comfortable with first- and even second-trimester abortions is not going to be up in arms over medical research involving days-old cellular clumps — blastocysts, as they are known in scientific terminology — that would otherwise be discarded.

Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley, a moderate on abortion rights, offered a fascinating insight in a recent column. The anti-choice movement, he argued, built support for its position in recent years by waging a campaign against so-called partial-birth abortion — a non-absolutist position designed to appeal to people who were in other circumstances pro-choice. By contrast, he wrote, the movement’s opposition to stem-cell research was just the sort of narrow absolutism that would turn people off. “I would find a funeral service for a blastocyst grotesque,” he wrote. “And to the extent that my pro-life friends have a political objective of moving people like me closer to their view, what they’ve accomplished by making an issue of partial birth abortion is likely to be undone by making an issue of the blastocyst.”

The pragmatic argument against federal funding is, on its surface, more appealing, but in the end it falls apart because of its illogic. Simply put, the pragmatists point out that human embryos are not the only or even necessarily the best source of stem cells, noting that researchers have found stem cells in placenta tissue and, unexpectedly, in adults.

Scott Gottlieb, writing in the American Spectator, reported recently that venture capitalists have been putting their money into adult-stem-cell research rather than into programs that use embryos, mainly because some scientists have found that adult stem cells are easier to control and are thus better suited for medical use. Wesley J. Smith, in the Weekly Standard, offered a similar argument, with the novel twist that the media have suppressed news of advances in adult-stem-cell research because it clashes with the political agenda of the pro-choice movement.

The biggest problem with the pragmatic argument, though, is that pragmatism requires that scientists pursue whatever methods work best. Last month, an advisory commission reporting to Bush found that embryonic stem cells do, indeed, appear to work better than those taken from other sources. If it is the pragmatists’ position that the use of embryonic cells is both morally repugnant and scientifically unnecessary, what will they say if they’re shown to be wrong on the science?

“The ethical questions are certainly riveting, but they may be swiftly trumped by the market,” wrote Gottlieb.

Maybe. Maybe not.

Bush, who’s enjoyed an extraordinarily lucky political life, may get lucky yet again. Though his pending decision is generally described as a classic either/or, Karl Rove, his chief political adviser and principal emissary to the religious right, is reportedly crafting a compromise. A small quantity of stem cells from human embryos are already being used in research; those cells could be made to multiply so that other labs would be able to get their own supplies.

Rove may push his boss to endorse federal funding for research using those particular cells, but no others, which may be enough to placate anti-choice extremists. In time, perhaps work with stem cells taken from adults and placentas will progress to the point that human embryos are no longer needed. Not that that will solve the problem of what to do with the unclaimed, unwanted embryos that exist in suspended animation at fertilization clinics (some elements of the religious right have gone so far as to start an “embryo adoption” movement). But that’s a different fight.

There is another important point Bush needs to consider, and it demonstrates that the moral universe can’t always be neatly divided into black and white. Stem-cell research will continue whether there is federal funding or not, and whether it is conducted in the United States or not. The growth and manipulation of stem cells is a serious business: it uses some of the same techniques as cloning and could, in fact, lead to the creation of the first human clones if misused. As Gregg Easterbrook wrote in the New Republic two years ago, the no-federal-funding rule has created the “preposterous” situation in which “most stem-cell research is not being done by publicly funded scientists who must pass multiple levels of peer review and disclose practically everything about their work. Instead, most stem-cell science is in the hands of corporate-backed researchers.”

Thus, not only could funding stem-cell research lead to miraculous cures and treatments to alleviate human suffering; it would also bring scientists out of the shadows and into the light of public accountability.

Stem-cell research is simply too important to leave in the hands of private interests. If Bush lacks the moral courage to stand up to his right-wing supporters, then we’ll all be worse off.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy@phx.com.