Writes Ertelt,

The NRLC letter says “there is a substantial chance that you will soon see an attempt to ram through the House of Representatives, on short notice, legislation that would authorize federal funding of research on human embryos created specifically to be used in research.”

The DeGette embryo destruction bill would “open the door to federal funding of human cloning and human embryo farms,” the pro-life group told LifeNews.com.

The letter explains that, contrary to assurances given to members of Congress in the past, the DeGette bill “will not limit the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to the use of human embryos who are donated by their parents after being ‘left over’ at in vitro fertilization clinics.”

Instead, the measure would “empower NIH to use human embryos created especially to be used in research, including embryos created by human cloning,” NRLC indicates.

Mouse Embryonic Stem Cells

According to Michael Hiltzik in this March 30 piece from the Los Angeles Times, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine isn’t doing too well these days: 

The $6-billion [stem cell] program was enacted by voters in 2004 as Proposition 71 after a campaign of exceptional intellectual dishonesty, featuring vignettes of sufferers from diabetes, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other heartbreaking diseases for which it seemed to promise imminent cures through research into embryonic stem cells.

Sound familiar? Read on:

Proposition 71 endowed the program with what looked like an embarrassment of riches. The danger is that, without better oversight and broader debate about its policies and goals, it will become simply an embarrassment.

Which goes to prove:

Successful Emotional Appeal to Voters + Gobs of Government Cash + Lack of Rigorous Ethical Guidelines = Disaster.

You can read the entire article here.

HT: Center for Genetics and Society.

though federal dollars still won’t directly fund embryo destruction, federally funded researchers can obtain embryos privately created only for experimentation. Thus, taxpayers now are incentivizing a market for embryo creation and destruction.

Next comes a move to lift the unfortunately named Dickey-Wicker amendment in Congress, which prohibits using tax dollars to create human embryos for research purposes. If the amendment is rescinded, then human embryos can be created and destroyed with federal tax dollars.

Here’s the full article from The Detroit News.

No big deal if you believe that human life begins at implantation, live birth, or doesn’t matter at all. A big deal if you believe, as I do, that life begins at conception.

You can read about it at bloomberg.com, et. al.