Obama administration appeals decision halting stem cell research funding

September 01, 2010

The Obama administration has appeal a US District Court’s decision to halt the expanded public funding of embryonic stem cell research. Such research entails the killing of human embryos in order to extract the stem cells.

The decision causes “irrevocable harm to the millions of extremely sick or injured people who stand to benefit” from the continued public funding of such research, according to the Justice Department, “as well as to the defendants, the scientific community, and the taxpayers who have already spent hundreds of millions of dollars on such research through public funding of projects which will now be forced to shut down and, in many cases, scrapped altogether.”

In 1995, Congress passed the Dickey Amendment, which banned the federal funding of “research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed.” By distinguishing between the act of killing the human embryos (which must be privately funded) from research on stem cell lines (which it argued could be publicly funded), a Clinton administration memo paved the way for federal funding of embryonic stem cell research by the Bush and Obama administrations.

US District Court Judge Royce Lambeth ruled, however, that the Dickey Amendment applied to embryonic stem cell research because it “necessarily depends upon the destruction of a human embryo.”

 

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Further information:

• Feds appeal order blocking stem cell research (AP)
• US bishops praise ruling on stem cell research, note ill effects of Clinton administration memo (CWN, 8/25)
• Stem Cell Research (USCCB)