President Obama has often claimed that his administration will pursue policies designed to breach the cultural and political divides that rend our country. He has also promised to bring “transparency” to the principal actions of his administration. Unfortunately, the president violated both of these assurances in his recent executive order on embryonic stem-cell funding. The mainstream media–still obsessed with discrediting all things “Bush”–focused gleefully on the expected rescission of the restriction that under Bush limited federal funding to embryonic stem cell lines in existence on August 9, 2001. But opening up all existing and future embryonic stem cell lines to federal funding is not all that Obama did. While he made no mention of it in his widely covered East Room speech, a quiet press release issued on Monday stated that in addition to the above change, “Executive Order 13435 of June 20, 2007, which supplements the August 9, 2001, statement on human embryonic stem cell research, is revoked.”
That opaque notice tells us absolutely nothing. But a little research makes clear why the administration was so terse: The 2007 executive order required the government to make a point of funding what are known as “alternative methods” for obtaining pluripotent stem cells. These are procedures that don’t require the destruction of embryos to derive these powerful cells, which are theoretically able to become any tissue in the body. It is this capacity that scientists say makes embryonic stem cells so valuable.
