IN MANY WAYS, MASSACHUSETTS Governor Mitt Romney is among the most fortunate of men. Scion of a prominent family (Romney’s father George was president of American Motors Company and later governor of Michigan), Romney enjoyed a spectacularly successful business career as founder and chairman of the highly regarded private equity/venture capital firm Bain Capital. More importantly by his measure, he’s happily married with five children and eight grand-children. Romney also possesses several attributes that would serve any politician well: good looks, a keen intellect (as evidenced by degrees from both Harvard’s Business and Law Schools), and an almost preternaturally engaging personality. As a politician, Mitt Romney is considered by friend and foe to be the total package.
But since becoming the Bay State’s governor in 2002, Romney’s luck has been questionable. First, a little less than a year ago, the Massachusetts Supreme Court discovered in the Commonwealth’s John-Adams penned state constitution a right for gay marriage. Now it has come to Romney’s attention that scientists at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute are planning to clone human embryos for the purpose of forwarding embryonic stem cell research. This new issue has the potential to make gay marriage look like a mere tempest in a teapot.
UNTIL LAST WEEK, it was widely assumed that Governor Romney was an unlimited ally of embryonic stem cell research. His wife, Ann, suffers from multiple sclerosis, one of the diseases for which embryonic stem cell research holds out the greatest promise. Moreover, his position on embryonic stem cell research has always been to the left of the Republican mainstream: The governor’s stance allowed for embryos “left-over” from in-vitro fertilization clinics to be used for embryonic stem cell research so long as the parents gave their written permission for the research, were not paid, and were offered the options of either storing the embryos or offering them up for adoption.
But in an interview last Friday, he said he was disturbed by Harvard’s plans. In a recent meeting between the governor, Douglas Melton of the Stem Cell Institute, and other Harvard officials, Romney learned for the first time that the Institute planned to clone human embryos specifically for research purposes. The Harvard team intended to harvest the cloned embryo’s stem cells for medical research that they hoped would lead to treatments for diseases as diverse as Alzheimer’s and diabetes. This process would include the embryo’s destruction.
Regarding the embryo cloning, Dr. Melton told the New York Times last week, “It is the only method that I can think of now to get at the root causes of these diseases.” This method, called “therapeutic cloning” by its advocates, clearly bothered the governor. For Romney, the ethical concerns trumped the promising potential of Melton’s research. As he puts it, “Whether you’re personally pro-life or pro-choice, we should be able to agree on ethical boundaries that should not be crossed when it comes to cloning human life for experimentation.”
Romney is careful to stress that he is approaching these ethical matters from a scientific, rather than a theological, vantage point: “When sperm and egg unite, something goes from inanimate to animate. It is life.” Romney is profoundly disturbed by the Stem Cell Institute’s plans to create (or clone) life with the clear intent of destroying the cloned organism, even if it does so before that organism becomes visible to the naked eye.
He also points to the different scientific tack suggested by Stanford Professor William Hurlbut. Hurlbut’s proposal may allow the same research results without the ethical complications of the Harvard approach. Put simply, the Hurlbut approach involves an altered nuclear transfer, which will prevent the clump of cells in question from ever attaining the integrated unity and coordinated coherence of a living organism. In an interview, he analogized this method to building a model airplane without the glue.
Hurlbut is as excited about the possibilities of embryonic stem cell research as is Harvard’s Dr. Melton. But as a member of the President’s Council on Bio-Ethics (commonly known as the Kass Commission), Hurlbut is concerned that the Harvard team and others “don’t see the moral issues as serious.” He concludes, “If there were no moral issues we’d want to explore the full science of stem cell possibilities–but there are ethical issues.”
GOVERNOR ROMNEY shares Hurlbut’s concerns, but unlike the professor, he is in a position to act. So he has proposed legislation that would make the kind of “therapeutic cloning” planned by Harvard illegal.
So far, Romney appears to have a momentary advantage. The president of the Massachusetts Senate, Robert Travaglini, has put forth a bill (which the governor asserts Harvard wrote for the senator) to counter Romney’s proposal; Travaglini’s bill will legalize Harvard’s contemplated research.
But in an op-ed which Travaglini co-wrote in Sunday’s Boston Globe, the state senator assured voters that his bill will not “involve the creation of fertilized eggs, nor does it involve the cloning of human beings.” While a careful parsing of this statement indicates the senator is not ruling out the cloning of human embryos, Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom responds that based on his op-ed “the Senate president and other supporters of cloning should be open to new statutory language banning the creation of embryos through cloning for research purposes.”
ROMNEY IS AWARE that as the governor of one of the bluest states he faces a lonely fight. The potential promised by stem cell proponents has tantalized the American public, and in strongly pro-choice Massachusetts the ethical issues raised by embryos not brought to term may not resonate very loudly. And for his part, while being personally pro-life, Romney promised during his 2002 campaign not to alter the Commonwealth’s pro-choice laws.
In addition to facing a likely difficult struggle against formidable local institutions such as Harvard, a Democrat dominated state Congress and the Boston Globe, Romney also now stands accused of political opportunism. While he has resolutely refused to engage in any conversations regarding 2008 presidential politics, he is widely recognized as a rising Republican star and a potential player in the next campaign. Last week the New York Times speculated that Romney’s stance was cynically “calibrated to a national stage.”
But this charge hardly makes sense. If Romney truly has national ambitions, he will probably need to run a successful 2006 reelection campaign, first.
That campaign promises to be anything but easy. In a Boston Herald poll last week, Romney showed an impressive 62 percent approval rating. However, the poll was not without bad news for the governor: When matched up against his likely Democratic rival, Attorney General Tom Reilly, Romney trailed 45-41. Given the tendencies of Massachusetts’ liberal electorate, tacking to the right on stem cells won’t make this fight any easier.
But that is the course Romney has chosen. As he put it during our interview, “I didn’t ask for the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to legalize gay marriage, and I didn’t ask for Harvard to institute a program of cloning human embryos. But as governor, it wasn’t an option to sit on the sidelines.”
On this last count, Romney is somewhat mistaken. Many politicians would no doubt have opted to stay off the field of play, at least long enough to summon their advisors and convene their focus groups in order to scientifically determine which way the political winds blew. In this case, Romney seems to be governed far more by principle than by political expedience. Whether that will be to his political betterment remains to be seen.
Dean Barnett writes about politics and other matters at soxblog.com under his on-line pseudonym James Frederick Dwight. In 1994, he volunteered on Mitt Romney’s failed senatorial campaign.
