Pro-life advocates and the Catholic Church are in opposition to stem cell research because it involves the destruction of human embryos.
Fifty-eight percent of Americans said that they support stem cell research in a recent ABC News poll. Sixty percent of those who support stem cell research agree that it should be federally funded. Almost half of the opposition is religiously influenced.
Americancatholic.org reported that the late Pope John Paul II once said embryonic stem-cell research is related to abortion, euthanasia and other attacks on innocent life. Washington Post columnist Michael Kinsley has a similar opinion.
He said, “If embryos do have full human rights, then fertility clinics are death camps with a side order of cold-blooded eugenics because they produce more embryos than they intend to implant and destroy the remainder of them.”
During a heated debate at Capitol Hill, opponents of embryonic stem cell research associated it to genocide. The National Institutes of Health defines it as embryonic eggs that are fertilized in test tubes and not in a woman’s body.
As a woman, Joan Samuelson, president and founder of the Parkinson's Action Network, approves the research. She said, "Today, embryos are being discarded that could be saving a million people and me with Parkinson's."
In May 2005, President Bush made an important statement. “I am a strong supporter of stem cell research, but I've made it very clear to Congress that the use of federal taxpayer money to promote science that destroys life in order to save life, I am against this." With the election of a new president in the fall, different opinions will arise.
Both 2008 presumptive presidential nominees, John McCain and Barrack Obama, support federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, as reported by CNN Politics.
Robert Mitchell, 65-year-old Penn State biology professor, said, “So much good can become of it[stem cell research].”
A stem cell is a basic cell that creates identical copies of itself. Scientists have studied the possibilities of curing such diseases as diabetes, hemophilia, arthritis, and Alzheimer’s with stem cell research. This regenerative medicine can also be used to test drugs and grow human tissue.
Eighteen-year-old Obama supporter and Penn State student Claire Gray thinks stem cell research is a good idea.
Greg Stewart, also an Obama supporter, said that Obama is in favor of expanding and advancing stem cell research with the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2005.
Obama voted against Sen. Norman Coleman’s HOPE Act, which is supposed to increase stem cell research without harming human embryos.
John McCain does not want the controversial technology to erode moral and ethical principles. He opposes fetal farming and cloning because he says using human embryos specifically for research purposes is wrong.
Jonathan M. W. Slack, director of the Stem Cell Institute at the University of Minnesota, said, “I believe that stem cell research, in the broad sense and in the long term, has huge potential to revolutionize medicine and that it is very unwise to rule out particular lines of research in advance.”