NRL News
Page 8
November/December 2009
Volume 36
Issue 11-12

Nebraska Pro-Lifers Push Ahead after Tie Vote
By By Julie Schmit-Albin, Executive Director, Nebraska Right to Life

Despite a November 20 setback at the hands of the University of Nebraska Board of Regents, Nebraska pro-life organizations will continue their battle against unethical medical research at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC).

Nebraska Right to Life and other pro-life groups were in front of UNMC’s governing board at its October and November meetings. We were pressing the regents for action on a pro-life resolution to hold university policy on embryonic stem cell research to the policy instituted by President George Bush in 2001. Under that executive order federal funding of embryonic stem cell research (ESCR) would extend only to stem cell lines developed as of August 2001, but not after.

Pro-life groups brought the request to the regents because last March pro-abortion President Barack Obama rescinded Bush’s ESCR policy.

However, the disappointing 4–4 tie vote means the University of Nebraska Medical Center will continue the policy of following whatever the current federal administration guidelines are with respect to ESCR.

Public input was taken during the two meetings held at the Varner Hall in Lincoln, the administrative building where the regents meet.

The regents’ meetings garnered much publicity because LB 606, a bill to ban public funding of cloning, had already passed the Nebraska legislature in 2008. While we didn’t get a ban on cloning in Nebraska paid for with private monies, a ban on public funding of the creation and destruction of embryos (LB 606) was seen as a victory by pro-life groups.

The Bush guidelines were rescinded by Obama in March with new guidelines instituted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in July. The NIH recently approved a number of human embryonic stem cell lines for use by federally financed researchers.

The experiments to be financed by the NIH require the destruction of human embryos for their stem cells. For now, federal funds can be used only to harvest stem cells from “surplus” embryos “left over” at fertility labs.

However, this is merely the camel’s nose under the tent. Many researchers all along have made it clear that they wish to create human new embryos for the purpose of harvesting them.

Note the latest development here. Obama dissolved the Bush’s Presidential Council on Bioethics and replaced it with his own Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. Many fear that the new commission may well push for human cloning.

The vote at the Nebraska University Board of Regents would have come down on the side of the pro-life resolution had it not been for one regent who had previously insisted he stood with us against unethical medical research. But the flip-flopper, ironically, left pro-life forces a gift.

His reasoning for his turnaround was that the state legislature had already set policy on ESCR. This is not true. The legislative limitations were on cloning also known as somatic cell nuclear transfer, not ESCR.

He further elaborated that the regents needed to comply with what our pro-life legislature and governor had agreed to with LB 606—banning human cloning but not public funding of ESCR. But by using LB 606 as an excuse it gives Nebraska Right to Life and others just what we need to go back to the legislature and ask them to finish the job that we tried to begin with the regents.

Discussions have ensued with pro-life state senators towards that end. Hopefully the 2010 legislative session will be addressing how to hold back the Obama Administration’s push for ESCR, at least in Nebraska.