Stem cell vote may challenge president
WASHINGTON -- In its first vote on stem cell research since President Bush imposed restrictions on federal funding nearly four years ago, the US House of Representatives today is expected to defy a presidential veto threat and pass legislation permitting taxpayer dollars to underwrite research using unneeded embryos from fertility clinics.
The bipartisan sentiment in favor of funding more stem cell research exposes a growing fissure within the Republican Party between moderates eager to mine the promise of stem cells to control diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, and social conservatives, including Bush, who want to prevent the destruction of human embryos.
The stem cell vote, analysts note, could trigger another public showdown between social conservatives and moderates less than two months after Bush and GOP leaders on Capitol Hill interceded to reinsert Terri Schiavo's feeding tube. Polling afterward indicated that most voters favored leaving the brain-damaged woman's fate up to her husband and doctors.
The White House and its allies are raising the stakes today with a Rose Garden appearance of ''snowflake" children, those born to mothers using embryos that had been created for other couples' fertility treatments.
''When you see the faces of our children, it drives the passion," said Doni Brinkman, a 32-year-old Phoenix woman who trolled the halls of Congress yesterday with her 4-year-old son, Tanner, who wore a T-shirt proclaiming, ''This embryo was not discarded."
Brinkman's son is one of 81 children born after their parents adopted frozen fertility clinic embryos through the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program, a Christian agency heavily promoted by James Dobson, founder of the conservative Focus on the Family. Brinkman told the story of picking up her 11 frozen embryos -- mistakenly delivered to a Fed Ex warehouse -- and later watching ''my child divide before my eyes."
''One of our tasks is to put a human face on this," said a senior administration official. ''The other side has compelling narratives. We can't answer that with theoretical arguments."
Meanwhile, supporters of the House bill to expand federal funding of stem cell research are mounting a human showcase of their own, including a mother with Parkinson's disease and a 13-year-old girl with type 1 diabetes, in support of legislation that they say can open promising new avenues of research.
''I must have had literally hundreds, probably thousands of conversations with people at home who are sick and who say, 'Is there anything that you can do for us?' " US Representative Michael Castle, Republican of Delaware and cosponsor of the bill under consideration, said at a news conference yesterday.
Passions on both sides of the issue have heightened since last week, when South Korean researchers announced they had produced human embryos through cloning and then extracted the stem cells.
Politically, the stem cell issue, coming on the heels of the Schiavo episode, poses a problem for the Republican Party.
Recent polling conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found a strong upswing, from 43 percent to 56 percent over three years, among those Americans favoring stem cell research that might result in cures for disease. About a third surveyed said it was more important to avoid destroying human embryos.
Solid majorities of Democrats favored using embryos for research. But Republicans were divided. Even among self-described social conservatives, those most likely to have objections to stem cell research, 45 percent opposed the destruction of embryos, while 40 percent favored conducting such research.
Bush, however, feels so strongly against using human embryos in stem cell research that he threatened to use the first veto of his presidency to stop an expansion of federal funding. The House bill under consideration today has 201 sponsors, including two dozen Republicans. While a similar bill in the Senate also enjoys wide bipartisan support, it's not clear that either chamber could mount the two-thirds vote needed to override a veto.
Republican pollster Whit Ayres contends that stem cell research is very different from the Schiavo case, where ''people understood and had strong feelings to have those difficult end-of-life decisions stay within the family, supported by physicians and clergy." By contrast, he said, ''stem cell research is a very complex issue where people are torn." 