This morning Chip Maxwell and others are pointing out that Barack Obama's revocation of President Bush's rules on embryonic stem cell experimentation turns out to be more despicable than what was suggested in the initial headlines. For not only did Obama make it open season on human embryos...not only did he open up your purse strings to finance such monstrosity...but he even went so far as to drop funding for the most promising, most uncontroversial line of scientific research of all.
Here's a brief commentary from Wesley Smith from over at First Things.
We all know that President Obama rescinded the Bush funding restrictions for ESCR. But that isn’t all he did today. He also rescinded Executive Order 13435 of June 20, 2007.
The Administration didn’t publicize this part of the President’s nasty work, but the now dead 2007 Bush order explicitly required funding for “alternative methods” of stem cell research—such as the new induced pluripotent stem cells (IPSC), a process that changes skin or other cells such as hair follicles into pluripotent stem cells without making or destroying embryos. IPSCs offer so much promise—and all without the ethical contentiousness of human cloning and embryonic stem cell research. Indeed, these alternative methods are one of the few areas in which people who are pro-life and pro-choice, conservative and liberal, pro and anti-ESCR can agree upon, the very type of policy that this president said he wanted to pursue.
I can think of only two reasons for this unwarranted action, for which I saw no advocacy either during the election or in the first weeks of the Administration: First, vindictiveness against all things “Bush” or policies considered by the Left to be “pro-life”; and second, a desire to get the public to view unborn human life as a mere crop ripe for the harvest. Wait, there’s a third potential reason: both of the above.
So much for taking the politics out of science!
