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Politics : The abortion issue: pro-choice vs. anti-abortion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LLCF who wrote (161)	3/17/2009 2:19:28 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 286

No your point about funding is quite wrong. Yes congress votes the funds, but the president proposes a budget, and then signs the budget. More importantly it wasn't a directed budget action that causes the funding to transition from forbidden to allowed, it was an executive order. Congress has the power to override such orders with legislation, but it didn't. It was Obama's specific action which will cause the funds to flow in to this research. AT BEST a slanted misrepresentation ("Obama responsible for killing) Now your misrepresenting (or you where earlier) The original statement you quoted was (at least according to your post) "This means that American taxpayers will now be paying for the killing of human beings at a very early stage in their lives (as embryos), so that scientific research can make use of them for experiments that may or may not yield positive results." That statement is true, and quite simply and obviously true. The research would involve destroying embryos to create stem cell lines. <The real original ban was very coherent. No federal funding for this type of research at all. Bush made a more complex ban later.> Tim, really... please post specifics... You where presenting yourself as so expert on the details of these funding restrictions, I thought you knew about their history. Also "No federal funding" is rather specific. But if you want some history of the issue... ------------- Nature Medicine 5, 6 (1999) doi:10.1038/4673 Scientists appeal to revoke funding ban on embryo research The congressionally imposed ban on US government funding of embryo research has come under attack from prominent American scientists who believe that lack of federal support prevents many of the nation's talented researchers from participating in one of the most promising avenues of biomedical research. Their unhappiness with the funding prohibition comes specifically in response to recent news that two privately funded teams have developed and grown human stem cells for the first time, one group using embryos as its source. On December 2nd, the scientists involved in the work—James Thomson, of the University of Wisconsin's primate research center, and John Gearhart, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine—and National Institutes of Health Director Harold Varmus took their case to Capitol Hill. Government funding of research using embryos is essential if such work is to continue at a rapid pace, the researchers told members of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education. The ban was first imposed by Congress in 1995, and was renewed in legislation signed by President Clinton only weeks before the stem cell results were announced. Clinton lifted a ban on federal funding of research using fetal cells in 1993 that was first imposed by Ronald Reagan, but cannot lift the embryo research ban as it was enacted through congressional legislation. nature.com ------------- Funding & policy debate in the US * 1993 - As per the National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act, Congress and President Bill Clinton give the NIH direct authority to fund human embryo research for the first time.[62] * 1995 - The U.S. Congress passes an appropriations bill attached to which is a rider, the Dickey Amendment which prohibited federally appropriated funds to be used for research where human embryos would be either created or destroyed. President Clinton signs the bill into law. This predates the creation of the first human embryonic stem cell lines. en.wikipedia.org ----------------------- Bush changed it because "this type of research" (from your quote) made no sense. There wasn't even moral grounds on a lot of it The moral grounds was that it is research involving the destruction of human life. Bush tried to finesse the issue, by funding only research on embryonic stem cell lines that had already be created (so no embryos would be destroyed in the process), but that only allowed for very limited funding of research.