When three federal court judges unanimously ruled in June 1970 that “the Texas abortion laws must be declared unconstitutional,” the moral tsunami speeding towards our country’s social shoreline was still far off in deep waters undetectable by most people.  The killer wave picked up speed when the Supreme Court took the case in 1971, but still most people of good will remained oblivious to the danger.  The wave hit on January 22, 1973.  The body count from it is now around 40 million.  The catastrophe has been felt more widely in social attitudes towards the unborn, sex, marriage and the family.  It’s divided our national politics into pro-life and pro-choice camps.  Our states are now either red or blue depending on how the majority feel about the Roe decision.  We come to Washington each year, to ground zero, to commemorate the disaster and talk about ongoing relief efforts for its unborn victims.

I’m sorry to say that another moral tsunami has been forming off our social shores for the past ten years.  Presently it’s picking up speed in shallow waters and if we don’t find a solution, it will strike innocent life with a vengeance fiercer than the blow of 1973.

I’m talking about embryo destructive experimentation.  The imminent danger is not that scientists will begin to create and destroy human embryos.  That’s been going on for a long time, as had abortion in the U.S. before 1973.  In fact most of us benignly sat by in July 1978 when Cambridge researcher Robert Edwards ushered in the age of IVF with the astonishing announcement that baby Louise Joy Brown had been born in Manchester, England.

The problem is rather the institutionalization of the creation of human life for destructive purposes funded by the federal government.  Most basic scientific research in the US is funded by the National Institutes of Health (up to $20 billion per year). Without federal funding, research in an area can be crippled or even undermined completely.  In 1996 Congress passed the Dickey-Wicker Amendment banning the use of federal funds for research that involved the creation or destruction of human embryos; the legislation was supported at the time by President Clinton.  The amendment’s restrictions became especially galling to scientists after the successful isolation in 1998 of the first embryonic stem cells (ESCs).  Under pressure from lobbyists and the mainstream media, Clinton approved in 2000 federal guidelines permitting the NIH to fund research on stem cells derived from ‘spare’ embryos slated for destruction at fertility clinics.  HHS lawyers argued that the Clinton guidelines still conformed to Dickey-Wicker insofar as the embryo destruction would be done by privately funded researchers and NIH would only fund research on the stem cells subsequently derived.  The NIH immediately began accepting grant proposals from scientists.

In August 2001, newly elected George W. Bush passed an executive order aimed at limiting the harm to embryos that the Clinton guidelines threatened.  His order stipulated that NIH dollars could only fund ESC research on certain pre-approved stem cell lines created by that date.  Since then NIH grant proposals have been carefully scrutinized to assure that the federal money would not be used in any way that facilitates harm to human embryos.

Since the 2006 Democratic turnover of congress, Dickey-Wicker and the executive order have been in the Democrats’ crosshairs.  The Democratic Senate passed a bill in early 2007, the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act (S.5), which would allow federal funding for embryo destructive research.  The House passed the bill as well.  The President vetoed it last June.  After the veto, there were reports that the Democrats would try roll back pro-life provisions by attaching nullifications to appropriations bills, especially of the Mexico City Policy (which prohibits federal money to international family planning organizations that provide or promote abortion overseas), the Hyde Amendment (that prevents Medicaid from paying for abortions), and Dickey-Wicker.  In response to the reports, President Bush sent a letter to the Democratic leaders alerting them that he would veto any bills that weakened existing pro-life provisions.  The initiatives died for the time being.  But does anyone think that Mexico City, and the Hyde and Dickey Amendments will last long under a Clinton or Obama administration?

Two other pieces of troubling news, last Thursday, Jan. 17, 2008, a team of California researchers announced that for the first time human clones had been made—cloned embryos, that is—using DNA from adult donors.  Presently the US has no laws against human cloning.  The announcement should be a wake-up call—especially to legislators—of the urgency of the situation.  Another wakeup call came from across the Atlantic.  The same day the British governmental agency the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HFEA) granted permission to scientists in London and Newcastle to create human-animal hybrid embryos using human cells and animal eggs.  It should be noted that we have no laws against creating hybrid embryos either.  Both the California and the UK teams insisted that the embryos would be destroyed at 14 days or sooner.

So what can be done to defend the human embryo from even wider exploitation?  The gold standard solution would be for state and federal legislatures to enact laws to support ethical research and to prohibit funds to research that involves harm to human embryos.  But given the momentum of the biotech movement is such a solution possible?  I think it is.

Not only has there been bad news of late, there has also been an extraordinary piece of good news in stem cell research.  Last November, researchers in Wisconsin and Japan announced simultaneously that they had suc­cessfully transformed skin cells into pluripotent stem cells.  By injecting four genes into the adult skin cells, the teams were able to induce (or “reprogram”) the cells to a state of pluripotency believed by the researchers to be functionally identical in key respects to embryonic stem cells.  This breakthrough allows for the creation of patient-specific stem cell lines without the morally problematic process of creating a cloned human embryo and deriving the patient-matched cells from destroying the embryo.  In other words, the breakthrough provides the scientific commu­nity with an alternative means for deriving pluripotent stem cells without needing to use human embryos.  This is of enormous significance.  Princeton Professor Robert P. George recently stated in an interview: “I can’t tell you how hugely important that is.”  James Thomson (known as the “father” of ESC research since he was the first to isolate ESCs in 1998), who heads the Wisconsin lab where iPSCs were first isolated, stated frankly that this breakthrough marks “the beginning of the end of the controversy” over embryonic stem cell research; “a decade from now this will be just a funny historical footnote.”  Prof. Ian Wilmut, pioneer researcher who cloned “Dolly” the sheep, decided to abandon therapeutic cloning in favor of the new reprogramming technology.  The research, he said, was “ex­tremely exciting and astonishing” and represents, he believes, the future for stem cell research.

A strategy for pro-life advocates is to press the point that the new breakthrough provides promising means for acquiring the coveted patient specific stem–cells without ever needing to harm a human embryo.  In other words, we can have our cake and eat it too: get pluripotent stem cells and avoid a socially divisive and morally controversial procedure.  This has to be trumpeted from the rooftops and repeated like a mantra—We have a way of avoiding killing human embryos!

Don’t think there won’t be resistance from the ESC lobby.  Since the exciting announcement, opponents of restraint have been resisting forcefully the conclusion that we no longer need to destroy human embryos.  William Neaves, for example, president and CEO of the powerful Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, MO, stated emphatically that “by no means do these advances mean that one should cut back in any way on the effort devoted to research with human embryonic stem cells.”  And Rudy Jaenisch (MIT) and Shinya Yamanaka (Kyoto University), two very prominent stem cell researchers, stated in response to the announcement: “we hold that research into all avenues of human stem cell research must proceed together.  Society deserves to have the full commitment of scientific inquiry at its service.”  But notwithstanding the resistance, we have a rare opportunity to press lawmakers to act now, to strike while the iron’s hot and capitalize on the extraordinary news of iPSCs.

It is impossible to predict the numbers of victims per year that will be generated if federal funding is given for embryo destructive research.  The most recent reliable data we have on the number of so-called ‘spare’ embryos in frozen storage at IVF clinics in the US is 400,000 (the Rand Study).  ESC researchers have had their eyes on this abundant source for years.  Suffice to say that lifting restrictions and granting federal funding would open the floodgates for scientists to exploit frozen embryos and create new human life on a mass scale for the sole purpose of experimentation and destruction.  And all taxpayers would be forced to pay for it.

In his great encyclical on the Gospel of Life, John Paul II stated: “Nothing and no one can in any way permit the killing of an innocent human being, whether a fetus or an embryo … Nor can any authority legitimately recommend or permit such an action” (no. 57).  Given recent troubling news from the world of regenerative medicine, it appears that many today are ignoring the words of the saintly pope.  Yet we are living through an historic time window right now for the pro-life movement.  We are back at 1972.  We have twelve months before the Democrats take back the White House.  Then the entire federal government will be in the hands of pro-choice politicians.  Action is needed now lest we be standing on our own ruined shores in two years looking at the damage and wondering what to do.  Like in the past 35 years, we will then begin scheduling new banquet dinners, conferences and marches on Washington to consider new relief efforts for the new scores of unborn victims.

* * *E. Christian Brugger is an Associate Professor of Theology and Philosophy and the Director of Integrative Research at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Arlington, VA, and is Senior Fellow at the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person. He is newly welcomed to the Culture of Life Foundation as Fellow in Ethics.