Create Life for Research Purposes and Destruction? Opposition Is Longstanding and Broad
Testifying before Congress on June 20, 2001, Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops stated that past plans to federally fund research in which embryos would be created solely to be sacrificed as a means of furthering the scientific agenda prompted massive public outcry. Even secular media giants such as the Washington Post and the Chicago Sun-Times condemned such a proposal. The Dickey amendment to the annual Labor/HHS appropriations bills (which has been renewed every year since being introduced in 1994) forbids funding the creation of human embryos for research purposes, as well as any research in which human embryos are subject to harm or destruction. More recently, President Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission, the NIH guidelines for embryonic stem cell research, and Senator Arlen Specter’s Stem Cell Research Act of 2001 all posited that embryos should not be created solely for use as experimental subjects.