Bush vs Obama on Stem Cell

President Bush’s 2001 executive order did not “ban” embryonic stem cell research, as much of the public has been led to believe, rather (he) ensured that (such) research could continue, but stopped short of providing government incentives for an unproven practice that many taxpayers believed to be morally abhorrent. Obama’s order ends that paradigm. Now researchers who engage in this specific form of stem cell research will be rewarded with federal funds. (While direct taxpayer funding of embryo destruction is explicitly banned by the 1995 Dickey Amendment, this new policy allows the government to subsidize the practice by outsourcing the dirty work to private entities).

Bush’s order restricted federal funding for embryonic stem cell research to cells derived from embryos that had already been destroyed (as of his speech of Aug. 9, 2001). While Bush’s critics favored moving that moral line to additionally permit the use of spare fertility clinic embryos, Obama replaced it with no line at all. He pointedly left open the creation of cloned -- and non-cloned sperm-and-egg-derived -- human embryos solely for the purpose of dismemberment and use for parts.

Apparently, Obama believes that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix. Moreover, given the temptation that embryonic manipulation presents to scientists and the well-recorded human propensity for evil (even in the pursuit of good), a bright line prohibiting the deliberate creation of human embryos (solely for the purpose of research) should’ve been respected.

On this, Obama has nothing to say. He leaves it entirely to the scientists. This is more than moral abdication. It is acquiescence to the mystique of "science" and its inherent absence of morality. How Obama can call this action “moral leadership” and how Jews, living with the memory of Mengele and Tuskegee, can support it, is hard to fathom.