New Jersey Pro-Life Advocates Protest Stem Cell Research Building 
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by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
November 12, 2007
Trenton, NJ (LifeNews.com) — New Jersey pro-life advocates were in New Brunswick to protest the construction of a new stem cell research center a week after they successfully defeated a state ballot proposal to make taxpayers fund more research. The proposal and center will both include embryonic stem cell research and human cloning they say.
The activists said the state should suspend the building of the research facility, known as the Stem Cell Institute of New Jersey, because of the vote.
"I think the voters have clearly spoken," Marie Tasy, director of New Jersey Right to Life, told the media at the event.
Steve Lonegan, the mayor of Bogota in Bergen County, also says he opposes the construction because voters told the state the research is immoral and that they want state government to get its fiscal house in order first.
"Last Tuesday, the voters of New Jersey sent a powerful message to Trenton," Lonegan said, according to a Star Ledger news report.
Residents of the northeastern state defeated Public Question # 2 with 53 percent of the vote coming in against it.
"That message is, ‘We’ve had enough of high taxes, enough of growing debt and enough of watching our friends and neighbors move out of New Jersey while the social engineers in Trenton continue to ignore the facts,’" he added.
He called embryonic stem cell research that scientists will conduct at the center, "high-risk, highly speculative" science that "we all know is destined to produce virtually nothing in terms of cures."
The legislature has already approved the $270 million needed to construct the new facility and the administration of Gov. Jon Corzine plans to continue building it despite the vote against the $450 million bond issue to fund the research there.
Lilo Stainton, a spokeswoman for Corzine, told the newspaper the voters only opposed the ballot proposal for fiscal reasons and not over ethical objections to embryonic stem cell research, which involves the destruction of days-old unborn children.
Tasy told LifeNews.com the result was a major defeat for Corzine , who personally campaigned for this Question and contributed $200,000 to a shadow group which ran radio ads and made phone calls featuring Michael J. Fox.
"This was an ill-conceived plan from the beginning. In the end, the people recognized that this $450 Million Boondoggle was politics masquerading as science and soundly rejected it," she said.
Related web sites:
New Jersey Right to Life – https://www.njrtl.org
