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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ColtonGang who wrote (159316)	7/9/2001 7:53:50 PM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Bush's no-win choice on stem cell research Chris Matthews Sunday, July 8, 2001 Washington, D.C. -- The moral question of whether to spend taxpayer dollars to finance stem cell research forces President Bush to confront a nasty pair of choices. Should the government underwrite medical research that kills fertilized human eggs now stored in fertility clinics in order to extract such cells? If Bush sticks to his opposition to such funding, he faces loud and rancorous condemnation by those who back cutting-edge research in battling lethal diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. If the president relents, he betrays the absolute conviction of those who believe human life begins at conception. Politically, it's a question of whom Bush most fears to offend: the Democrats, editorial writers and leaders of secular opinion who will denounce him from both left and center, or the religious communities, Roman Catholic and evangelical, who would see a 180-degree turn by Bush on the stem cell issue as a stark abdication of moral authority. Religiously, I would think the choice now hurtling toward Bush like a runaway train is more calamitous. How does he justify using tax dollars, which people must pay or go to prison, to finance the taking of life? Several of the president's anti-abortion allies claim to have solved the moral conundrum. Some say that a human embryo, a fertilized egg, is not truly a person until it is placed in a woman's uterus. Other proponents offer moral refuge by denying federal funds for research using new embryos. For a person who believes that life begins at conception, whether in a laboratory or in a womb, those factors mitigate nothing. Unlike the debate over abortion rights, the stem cell issue is not tied up with the culture war. It is not caught up in gender politics, the right of a woman to control her body. Nor can it be tagged and discarded as another attempt to bring government "into the bedroom." The question of whether to fund stem cell research has nothing to do with sex. It's a matter of metaphysics, our deepest thinking about that most basic question: What is human life and how should it be respected? I look for answers. Should even the most vehement abortion opponent want these embryos kept alive in perpetuity? Does anyone's moral belief require such an extraordinary extension of this test-tube life for centuries upon centuries? This is the moral quandary now sitting on the president's desk. It requires a decision worthy of Solomon, a daring leap of faith. This is not a tax cut, where you can divide the differences. This is a baby that cannot be cut in half. sfgate.com