IBDeditorials.com on Obama’s Stem-Cell Decision: Obama Puts Ideology Over Science (with Driehaus Update)

You don’t even need to be prolife, or to bring religion into the argument, to understand just how scientifically weak Barack Obama’s Executive Order lifting former President Bush’s ban on federally funding embryonic stem-cell research is, as IBD explains (bolds are mine):

Bailing Out Bad Science

Bioethics: The president keeps a promise by lifting restrictions on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research — what he calls “the gold standard” of such research. Judging by results, fool’s gold is more like it.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, then-Sen. Barack Obama said: “I believe that the restrictions that President Bush has placed on funding of human embryonic stem cell research have handcuffed our scientists and hindered our ability to compete with other nations.”

With all due respect, that is nonsense. With Obama lifting the restrictions on Monday, we will now be federally funding research that has yet to produce a single therapy or a single treatment of an actual human being, at least one that works. It has generated a lot of hope but very little change. It is he who is putting ideology over science.

What has handcuffed our scientists is the difficulty of controlling embryonic stem cells and what they develop into. They’re called pluripotent because they can develop into any type of human tissue, sometimes all at once.

Embryonic stem cells have a tendency to develop into one of the most primitive and terrifying forms of cancer, a tumor called a teratoma. Adult stem cells don’t have that problem.

Recently the family of an Israeli boy suffering from a lethal genetic brain disease sought a solution in the form of injections of fetal stem cells. These injections apparently triggered tumors in the boy’s brain and spinal cord.

It’s in the area of adult stem cell research that new discoveries are being made every day. Fact is, there are now hundreds of conditions and diseases actually being treated using adult stem cells drawn from umbilical cord blood and other nonembryonic sources.

The typical reaction to Obama’s move was represented in a Los Angeles Times sub-headline in its Saturday piece describing Obama’s decision. It read, “Lifting Bush’s limits on research will reopen a door for science.” But no door had been closed.

….. But (the Los Angeles Times) claims the potential of these induced pluripotent stem cells (IPS) “is still unclear.”

No, it’s not. They can do everything stem cells from destroyed embryos can do, except without the moral baggage or the destroyed embryos.

Read the whole thing.

I’ll restate IBD’s bottom line, with just a little emphasis:

Adult stem cells can do everything
stem cells from destroyed embryos can do,
without the moral baggage
or the destroyed embryos.

The culture of death’s determined, dogmatic devotion to anything anti-life is the only explanation for Obama’s ghoulish decision.

Obama campaigned as an uncompromising death cult advocate. That advocacy was downplayed greatly by the establishment media, so, sadly, many relatively disengaged prolife voters supported Obama on other grounds without knowing his anti-life positions. Obama’s EO is surely a rude awakening to many.

But Obama’s radical antilife views and history were not unknown to his fellow Democratic candidates for national office. Thus, the silence thus far from alleged prolife Democrats like Ohio’s Steve Driehaus and John Boccieri is deafening, and disgraceful.

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UPDATE: When I called Driehaus’s congressional office in Washington today, I was told in essence that the congressman hasn’t responded to President Obama’s Executive Order issuance, that he was working up a response, and that there is no timetable for when he will respond due to many other pressing matters.

Driehaus, absent sincere public repentance, is in an unsolvable Catch-22: If he opposes the Order, he admits that his vote for candidate Obama came despite Obama’s promise, surely known to him, to violate a core doctrine of the Catholic faith Driehaus alleges to profess. As such, he can no longer claim to a legitimate practicing Catholic. He also has on his conscience the misinformed votes of hundreds and maybe thousands of others who relied in part on his alleged prolife stance in voting for Obama.

If Driehaus supports the Order, he admits that he has irrevocably crossed over to the anti-life side, no longer believes in fundamental tenet of that faith, and, again, is no longer a legitimate practicing Catholic.

Absent sincere public repentance, Driehaus has no quarter, and no wiggle room.

How could winning a congressional seat possibly be worth all of that?