[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 47 (Wednesday, March 18, 2009)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3364-S3365]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           STEM CELL RESEARCH

  Mr. KYL. Mr. President, in a recent column for the Washington Post, 
``Obama's `Science' Fiction,'' Charles Krauthammer exposes President 
Obama's efforts to destabilize the delicate balance between moral 
concerns over destroying embryonic stem cells and advancing medical 
research that can be universally accepted.
  President Obama's recent decision to authorize expanded and seemingly 
unlimited Federal funding for stem cell research eviscerates the 
delicate balance forged by President Bush by forcing taxpayers to 
support embryonic creation and destruction. Mr. Krauthammer observed 
that some may ``favor moving that moral line to additionally permit the 
use of spare fertility clinic embryos,'' but ``President Obama replaced 
it with no line at all. He pointedly left open the creation of cloned 
and noncloned sperm-and-egg derived--human embryos solely for the 
purpose of dismemberment and use for parts.'' What is most concerning 
to me, and what Mr. Krauthammer succinctly exposes, is that President 
Obama's new embryonic stem cell policy is devoid of any ethical 
standards or guidelines. President Obama's decision makes the federal 
government the final arbiter in a moral argument that defies many 
Americans' core beliefs about the creation of life.
  I ask unanimous consent that his column be printed in the Record and 
I urge my colleagues to consider his thoughtful views.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

               [From the Washington Post, Mar. 13, 2009]

                       Obama's `Science' Fiction

                        (By Charles Krauthammer)

       Last week, the White House invited me to a signing ceremony 
     overturning the Bush (43) executive order on stem cell 
     research. I assume this was because I have long argued in 
     these columns and during my five years on the President's 
     Council on Bioethics that, contrary to the Bush policy, 
     federal funding should be extended to research on embryonic 
     stem cell lines derived from discarded embryos in fertility 
     clinics.
       I declined to attend. Once you show your face at these 
     things you become a tacit endorser of whatever they spring. 
     My caution was vindicated.
       President Bush had restricted federal funding for embryonic 
     stem cell research to cells derived from embryos that had 
     already been destroyed (as of his speech of Aug. 9, 2001). 
     While I favor moving that moral line to additionally permit 
     the use of spare fertility clinic embryos, President Obama 
     replaced it with no line at all. He pointedly left open the 
     creation of cloned--and noncloned sperm-and-egg-derived--
     human embryos solely for the purpose of dismemberment and use 
     for parts.
       I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is 
     conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a 
     human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and 
     deserves no more respect than an appendix. Moreover, given 
     the protean power of embryonic manipulation, the temptation 
     it presents to science and the well-recorded human propensity 
     for evil even in the pursuit of good, lines must be drawn. I 
     suggested the bright line prohibiting the deliberate creation 
     of human embryos solely for the instrumental purpose of 
     research--a clear violation of the categorical imperative not 
     to make a human life (even if only a potential human life) a 
     means rather than an end.
       On this, Obama has nothing to say. He leaves it entirely to 
     the scientists. This is more than moral abdication. It is 
     acquiescence to the mystique of ``science'' and its inherent 
     moral benevolence. How anyone as sophisticated as Obama can 
     believe this within living memory of Mengele and Tuskegee and 
     the fake (and coercive) South Korean stem cell research is 
     hard to fathom.
       That part of the ceremony, watched from the safe distance 
     of my office, made me uneasy. The other part--the 
     ostentatious issuance of a memorandum on ``restoring 
     scientific integrity to government decision-making''--would 
     have made me walk out.
       Restoring? The implication, of course, is that while Obama 
     is guided solely by science, Bush was driven by dogma, 
     ideology and politics.
       What an outrage. Bush's nationally televised stem cell 
     speech was the most morally serious address on medical ethics 
     ever given by an American president. It was so scrupulous in 
     presenting the best case for both his view and the contrary 
     view that until the last few minutes, the listener had no 
     idea where Bush would come out.
       Obama's address was morally unserious in the extreme. It 
     was populated, as his didactic discourses always are, with a 
     forest of straw men. Such as his admonition that we must 
     resist the ``false choice between sound science and moral 
     values.'' Yet, exactly 2 minutes and 12 seconds later he went 
     on to declare that he would never open the door to the ``use 
     of cloning for human reproduction.''
       Does he not think that a cloned human would be of 
     extraordinary scientific interest? And yet he banned it.
       Is he so obtuse as not to see that he had just made a 
     choice of ethics over science? Yet, unlike Bush, who 
     painstakingly explained the balance of ethical and scientific 
     goods he was trying to achieve, Obama did not even pretend to 
     make the case why some practices are morally permissible and 
     others not.
       This is not just intellectual laziness. It is the moral 
     arrogance of a man who continuously dismisses his critics as 
     ideological

[[Page S3365]]

     while he is guided exclusively by pragmatism (in economics, 
     social policy, foreign policy) and science in medical ethics.
       Science has everything to say about what is possible. 
     Science has nothing to say about what is permissible. Obama's 
     pretense that he will ``restore science to its rightful 
     place'' and make science, not ideology, dispositive in moral 
     debates is yet more rhetorical sleight of hand--this time to 
     abdicate decision-making and color his own ideological 
     preferences as authentically ``scientific.''
       Dr. James Thomson, the pioneer of embryonic stem cells, 
     said ``if human embryonic stem cell research does not make 
     you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought 
     about it enough.'' Obama clearly has not.

                          ____________________