Frist's Stem Cell Capitulation

Standard: The Doctor-Senator's Many Contradictions

(Weekly Standard) 

In his speech endorsing Castle-DeGette, Frist did also call for banning the creation of embryos solely for research and for banning human cloning. This makes him more responsible than most embryo research advocates. But he did not make his support for funding research using the "spares" contingent on setting such limits. So the effect of Frist's remarks was to strengthen the hand of those no-limits senators who wish to advance the very kinds of research that Frist still says he believes should be out of bounds (at least for now).

The incoherence of Frist's position is staggering. In his Senate speech, he explained that the "embryo is a human life at its earliest stage of development." He said that he believes, as a person of faith and a man of science, that "human life begins at conception." He reminded us that "we were all once embryos." He called on all citizens, including scientists, to treat human embryos with the "utmost dignity and respect." It was a clear and elegant statement on the dignity of early human life, backed up by a doctor's understanding of elementary embryology.

But then, as if giving a different speech, Frist called on the federal government to promote, with taxpayer dollars, the ongoing destruction of human embryos. In a television interview that day, he said that research using and destroying the "spares" can be done ethically so long as there is a "moral framework around informed consent." But if embryos deserve respect as nascent human lives, as Frist says he believes, it should not matter whether researchers have permission from their parents to destroy them. If embryos are "human life at its earliest stage," as Frist says he believes, then none of us possesses the authority to consent to their destruction. To promote embryo destruction and still claim to be "pro-life," as Frist did throughout his speech, is absurd.

Frist justified his position on using the "spares" by pointing to the unique scientific promise of embryonic stem cell research. He said that our policies must evolve with the times, and that "the limitations put in place in 2001 will, over time, slow our ability to bring potential new treatments for certain diseases." But by this logic, the more advanced research that will surely exist in the near future -- like the mass creation of genetically tailored embryonic stem cells, produced by creating and destroying cloned human embryos -- will justify shifting the moral and political boundaries yet again. It undermines the effort to ban human cloning, as Sen. Frist says he wants to do. And it may justify funding human cloning, as Sen. Frist may one day be convinced to do by his own reasoning. If the respect due to embryos is so little that the government should promote their destruction with NIH dollars, why not fund human cloning for research purposes, too? If the standards of human dignity evolve with the latest research possibilities, why not harvest human fetuses in animal wombs, if doing so is more likely to advance science and cure disease?