WASHINGTON — The Bush administration has given a green light to expand federal funding of research on cells from aborted babies — but some pro-lifers say that he had no choice.

In the past, the president has assured pro-life groups that he opposes public funding of research using tissue from “induced abortions” and the killing of human embryos for their stem cells. Nonetheless, federal funding of experiments that use human aborted fetal tissue has continued unabated under President Bush's government.

White House officials “quietly” in late May approved a $150,000 grant to Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine researcher John Gearhart for his work on stem cells derived from deliberately aborted fetuses, the Chicago Tribune reported July 7.

Judy Brown at American Life League termed the approval a betrayal of the pro-life cause. “The man broke a promise,” she said. “His deeds do not reflect his words.”

Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, said Bush is constrained from doing anything about the National Institutes of Health (NIH) decision by a 1993 act of Congress.

“The NIH reauthorization bill explicitly removed authority from the president and his appointees to block transplantation research using fetal tissue from induced abortions,” he said.

Earlier attempts to change that law have shown “there's no support in Congress to repeal that law,” Johnson added. “Once something is in federal law, it's much easier to defend it.”

Johnson said he believes that, while public support of research using “after-the-fact” tissue from aborted babies is unfortunate, the more pressing issue of cloning for research is more important.

Contacted by the Register, White House spokesman Dan Nelson would only reiterate an earlier official comment that the decision to fund fetal stem cell work “was based on long-standing law and guidelines.”

Stem Cells at Stake

Debate over fetal tissue research pits cutting-edge medicine against fundamental moral prohibitions.

Stem cells are versatile cells capable of transforming into many types of body tissue such as muscle, bone and nerve, and hence could be developed into transplant therapies for diseases such as Parkinson's and diabetes.

There are a number of sources of stem cells: adult tissue, umbilical cords of newborns, embryos and aborted fetuses. John Gearhart' team at John's Hopkins was the first, in 1998, to isolate stem cells from the developing ovaries and testicles of aborted babies between five and 11 weeks gestation, according to the published research. Working with funding from Geron Corp., a Menlo Park, Calif.- based biotech firm, he has since made more than 150 cell lines from fetal cells.

On May 20 the (NIH) awarded Gearhart's team $150,000 to continue work on two insulin-producing fetal cell lines with the potential to treat diabetes — a decision that is likely to be followed by further applications by other researchers for similar grants.

Wendy Baldwin, deputy director for extramural research at the NIH, was at the helm of the funding decision. The grant to Gearhart's team was merely the first time the Bush administration has funded fetal tissue research pertaining to stem cells, she explained.

“We've always supported fetal tissue research,” Baldwin said.

Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. had prohibited federal funding to experiments involving the direct transplantation of fetal tissue into human patients, but numerous other fetal tissue experiments were under-written with tax dollars during their presidential terms and an undetermined number of experiments using victims of abortion proceeded with private funds.

When former President Bill Clinton took office, his first official act in 1993 was to revoke the limited ban proscribing funding for fetal tissue transplant experiments. At the time, fetal tissue transplants were viewed as a sort of “holy grail,” with the potential to cure many diseases, including Parkinson's.

Since 1993 the federal government has spent more than $120 million to support research projects dependent on abortion for experimental material.

In 1999 the Texas-based pro-life group Life Dynamics Inc. exposed a vast underground trade in fetal tissue in which “brokers” went between abortion clinics and researchers who paid cash for fetal body parts. Life Dynamics' hard copy evidence included requests by Johns Hopkins University researchers for fetal colons and kidneys from 22- to 24- week-old babies.

Other orders came from tax-funded universities, biotech firms such as Genentech, and pharmaceutical companies such as Zeneca and vaccine manufacturer Smith Kline Beecham, requesting everything from tissue sections to whole legs, brains and eyes from late-term unborn babies. Researchers at the NIH itself placed purchase orders for leg bones, spleens, livers and heart tissue from second-trimester babies.

Since then, however, fetal tissue transplants — once viewed as cutting-edge medical promise — have fallen from grace.

Last April, University of Colorado Health Sciences Center researcher Curt Freed finally published his long-awaited data from a large control study of fetal tissue implants into the brains of Parkinson's patients conducted with a $5.7 million federal grant. A neurologist overseeing some of the researcher's younger fetal tissue recipients, who were suffering from uncontrolled facial spasm and violent limb jerking, called the results “tragic, catastrophic” and declared, “no more fetal transplants.”

By then, medical research had a new rising star: stem cells. The distinction between embryonic and fetal cells has often blurred.

Bush's Promises

But George W. Bush has been adamant that any use of unborn life for experimentation would be off limits in his administration.

During his presidential campaign, then Gov. Bush answered a questionnaire from the U.S. Catholic Conference about embryonic stem cell research, saying: “Taxpayer funds should not underwrite research that involves the destruction of live human embryos.” He also volunteered: “I oppose using federal funds to perform fetal tissue research from induced abortions.”

Early in his presidency he reaffirmed his opposition to abortion-dependent research, saying: “I believe there's some wonderful opportunities for adult stem cell research. I believe we can find stem cells from fetuses that died a natural death. But I do not support research from aborted fetuses.”

And last Aug. 9, when President Bush announced his decision to deny public funding of destructive embryonic stem cell research on moral grounds and to limit funding of embryo stem cell research to 60 cell lines already derived from embryos, he noted the failure of fetal tissue experiments.

“Even the most noble ends do not justify any means,” he said.

The revelation that the Bush administration has opened the door to increased funding to fetal stem cell research surprised some pro-lifers. C. Ben Mitchell, senior fellow at the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, an international Christian organization, noted that if Americans oppose killing early human embryos for research purposes, they are even more likely to oppose the “cannibalization” of more recognizably human fetuses.

“The more developed the human being, the more troubled we are about it,” he said.

Mitchell was reluctant to cast the president's pro-life talk as “disingenuous,” but he admitted the funding decision comes in a string of revelations that are not encouraging to pro-lifers, including recently appointed NIH Director Elias Zerhouni's public espousal of cloning embryos for research and a divided mid-July report from the President's Council on Bioethics regarding human cloning.

Family Research Council President Ken Connor also criticized Bush's decision with strong words.

“Mr. President, fetal stem cells are taken from human fetuses who have been intentionally killed,” he wrote in a letter to Bush during the week of July 8 urging him to challenge the 1993 law as unconstitutional. “To permit researchers to benefit from their deaths creates a perverse incentive for additional abortions. It also serves, in the eyes of society, to ‘ratify’ the decision to have an abortion in the first place since the ‘remain’ can be ‘useful.’”

Connor urged Bush to reverse his decision and to mount a sustained campaign of public persuasion to have the 1993 law repealed and reminded the president of his earlier pronouncement that “human life is a sacred gift from our Creator.”

Pope John Paul II, speaking about medical therapies in a year 2000 address to the International Congress of the Transplantation Society, criticized experimentation on fetal and embryonic human tissue.

“[M]ethods that fail to respect the dignity and value of the person must always be avoided. I am thinking in particular of attempts at human cloning with a view to obtaining organs for transplants: these techniques, insofar as they involve the manipulation and destruction of human embryos, are not morally acceptable, even when their proposed goal is good in itself. Science itself points to other forms of therapeutic intervention which would not involve cloning or the use of embryonic cells, but rather would make use of stem cells taken from adults. This is the direction that research must follow if it wishes to respect the dignity of each and every human being, even at the embryonic stage” (No. 8).

Celeste McGovern writes from Portland, Oregon.“