WASHINGTON, May 25, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The U.S. House of Representatives yesterday approved a bill to provide federal funds for stem cell research that would require killing human embryos—but if the bill survives its uncertain future in the Senate, the President’s promised veto will be sustained,
“Under this bill, human embryos would be killed by the very act of harvesting their stem cells for government-funded research,” commented National Right to Life Committee Legislative Director Douglas Johnson.
The House passed the bill by a margin of 238 to 194, which was 50 votes short of the two-thirds majority that would be required to override a veto.
The White House issued an official statement of Administration policy that said in part, “The bill would compel all American taxpayers to pay for research that relies on the intentional destruction of human embryos for the derivation of stem cells, overturning the President’s policy that supports research without promoting such ongoing destruction. If H.R. 810 were presented to the President, he would veto the bill.”
NRLC’s Johnson commented: “The biotechnology industry will not be satisfied with exploiting only embryos donated by parents—in fact, they are already seeking to create human embryos by cloning, for the specific purpose of harvesting their parts for research. Unless Congress acts promptly to ban human cloning, as many other nations have already done, biotech labs will establish what President Bush in the past has called ‘human embryo farms.’”
Enactment of a ban on human cloning takes on new urgency in the wake of a May 19 report that researchers in South Korea had, in 11 cases, “successfully” created a clone of a person with a disease, killed the cloned embryo, harvested stem cells, and started a cell line of tissue genetically like that of the clone’s parent-twin.
In related news, the House also passed, by a vote of 431 to 1, the Stem Cell Therapeutic and Research Act (H.R. 2520), sponsored by Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ), a bill to establish a new federal program to make stem cells extracted from umbilical cord blood available to patients who need them. This bill was endorsed by President Bush and by NRLC. In a statement of Administration policy released today, the White House said: “Cord-blood stem cells, collected from the placenta and umbilical cord after birth without doing harm to mother or child, have been used in the treatment of thousands of patients suffering from more than 60 different diseases, including leukemia, Fanconi anemia, sickle cell disease, and thalassemia. Researchers also believe cord-blood stem cells may have the capacity to be differentiated into other cell types, making them useful in the exploration of ethical stem cell therapies for regenerative medicine.”