Embryonic stem-cell research bill to get final vote before likely veto

Embryonic stem-cell research bill to get final vote before likely veto

On Thursday the U.S. House of Representatives will hold a vote on Senate-approved legislation that would increase taxpayer funding of embryonic stem-cell research. An award-winning biomedical science expert says the vote will be merely political theater staged by proponents of the legislation.

The House approved an initial measure in January on a 253-174 vote. The Senate passed a slightly different measure in April, 63-34, one vote short of the two-thirds majority needed to override a veto by President Bush.

Dr. David Prentice, senior fellow for life sciences at the Family Research Council (FRC), says the measure that will be sent to President Bush requires taxpayers to fund more research that requires destruction of young human embryos. "They've tried to sweeten the pod and make it sound better -- [but] bottom line, this is still a bad bill," he says. "It's a bill that would reward people for destroying embryos just for experiments."

The bill, says Prentice, needs to be defeated. "It's unlikely it will be, but the President has said he will veto it -- and he will veto it," he emphasizes.

The FRC spokesman predicts the bill is not going anywhere once that happens. "They're [definitely] not going to have enough votes to override the veto ... in the House," he explains. "They're close in the Senate, but it's still questionable whether they could override it even in the Senate."

Prentice points out there is no evidence that embryonic stem cells are going to help any patient in decades. Even proponents of the unethical research themselves, he notes, admit it will be decades if ever before an embryonic stem cell helps a patient. So it is unfortunate, says Prentice, that backers of the embryonic stem-cell research bill are ignoring the ethical and successful adult stem-cell research that is already helping patients now.

"So this is more a political drama that they're doing now to try and push this unethical agenda," he concludes, "[to] make the president look bad [and to] make conservatives who are against unethical research look bad."