This month’s Alabama court ruling that IVF (In Vitro Fertilization) embryos are “children” covered by wrongful death lawsuits has Republicans scrambling to distance themselves from the fallout. According to the party’s own polling, 85% of Americans support increasing access to fertility-related procedures and services. The high level of support remains consistent among the GOP’s most dedicated voters: 78% of abortion opponents and 83% of evangelicals support IVF specifically.
On August 9, 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush introduced a ban on federal funding for research on newly created human embryonic stem (ES) cell lines. The policy was intended as a compromise and specified that research on lines created prior to that date would still be eligible for funding. Seventy-one lines from 14 laboratories [1] across the globe met Bush’s eligibility criteria, and scientists who wished to investigate these lines could still receive grants through the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In practice, however, only 21 lines proved to be of any use to investigators [2].
It was a compromise that siad that some aborted corpses were okay.
They stopped any further lines from being created. What do you not understand about this? It was already ongoing research, and they put a stop to it for political purposes. Even if this calls it a “compromise” it meant that no further lines (no new fetal tissue) could be used.
Portraying GWB as someone who was fighting for stem cell research rather than against it is flat out false.
Where did I say he was fighting for it? I said that he didn’t ban it completely because there were other people in the GOP who wanted the research to continue.
If he’d really believed that the soul begins at conception, there would have no cell research at all. That’s the point I was trying to make.
What they wanted was no cell research at all. But that wasn’t politically possible, and it wasn’t because other members of the GOP didn’t want it. So he “compromised” by saying they could still use the existing lines but no future lines could be created. You’re acting like the GOP was okay with this, they were not. This was a compromise because it’s was the best they could do at the time, and it still got some of the research banned.
Sure Nancy Reagan was outspoken about it but it was not the GOP.