Bush Appoints Three Pro-Lifers to Bioethics Council

WASHINGTON, March 2, 2004 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Bush administration is working to moderate the influence of anti-life researchers and philosophers on the President’s Council on Bioethics. Elizabeth Blackburn, a biologist and William May, emeritus professor of ethics Southern Methodist University, have had their terms expire on the Council and will be replaced by three high-profile individuals who have been outspoken in their criticisms of embryonic stem cell research, abortion, and the silencing of the religious voice in public life.  The council was created by executive order in 2001 to give advice to the President on issues surrounding biomedical science and the new biotechnologies. It is staffed by a diverse group of leading researchers from the scientific, legal and philosophical academic communities.  The newly appointed members include Dr. Benjamin Carson, a renowned pediatric surgeon, director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, who rose from a life of poverty in the inner city of Detroit after a profound conversion. He has spoken out against the growing suppression of religious input in politics and has decried the fact that “we live in a nation where we can’t talk about God in public.”  Diana Schaub, another appointee, is chairman of the department of political science at Loyola College in Maryland. She has referred to embryonic research as, “the evil of the willful destruction of innocent human life,” and has called it a combination of slavery and abortion.  Peter Lawler, a professor of government at Berry College in Georgia, the third new appointee, has called on the US to, “become clear as a nation that abortion is wrong,” warning that women will be compelled, by the new thinking in bioethics, to abort genetically defective babies.