Barack Obama Would Reverse President Bush’s Stem Cell Research Policy
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
August 15, 2008
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — Voters can count on a President Barack Obama to expand abortions more than ever before with taxpayer funding, pro-abortion judges and overturning state pro-life laws. But they can also count on him to reverse President Bush’s protections on embryonic stem cell research.
While Bush has made sure taxpayers aren’t forced to pay for the grisly research, an Obama representative says he will force them to fund the destruction of human life.
Melody Barnes, the senior domestic policy adviser to the Obama campaign, told NPR that Bush has been the overseer of a so-called "war on science" because he won’t fund research that has never helped a single patient.
Barnes says Obama would immediately reverse Bush’s policy of not funding new embryonic stem cell research after taking office should he become president.
"[Obama] believes that upon being elected president of the United States, he could sign an executive order that would overturn the Bush position on stem-cell research and open up the avenues considerably," she told NPR.
While John McCain has opposed the pro-life movement on embryonic stem cell research, as LifeNews.com noted yesterday, he is moving in the pro-life direction and agrees with pro-life advocates on issues like human cloning and the purposeful creation of human embryos for destruction.
But Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an advisor for McCain, gives pro-life advocates more hope that he won’t force funding.
He says McCain hopes that advances in alternatives like iPSCs and direct reprogramming will make funding embryonic stem cell research unnecessary.
McCain’s "hope is that we may reach the day when we no longer need to use embryonic stem cells as the foundation of this particular line of research, where we can move to the more recent advances and take away the tough decisions about life versus science," he told NPR.
With his pro-abortion and pro-embryonic research policies and McCain’s opposition to abortion and potential for joining the pro-life movement on all bioethics issues, there is a clear difference for pro-life voters.
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