Though George Bush has taken a hit in the media this week (the NY Times was especially ruthless), I think he did the right thing. I do not agree with every policy coming out of this administration, but I appreciate that my tax dollars are not funding research I consider immoral. And I have no one but the president to thank.

I’ve been following the stem cell debate since the early 1990s, long before it hit the news. That’s because as a patient who lost seven pregnancies and later had an ectopic pregnancy, I was told by lots of experts in the fertility world that my husband and I would greatly benefit from information gained via embryonic stem cell research. Yes, it would mean the destruction of human life for our own benefit, but wouldn’t it be worth it to have “our own” biological child?

Huh? And this is touted as the “compassionate” side of the debate? How compassionate is that?

For a number of years I served on the national board of a consumer group for fertility patients, so I had access to memos floating around an NIH panel preparing to make recommendations to the White House on stem cell policy. And I saw shrewd strategies outlined—strategies such as, “Call it a ‘pre-embryo’ so those who are having a love affair with the embryo will be less disturbed,” and “Insist it’s not abortion because it’s not technically removing anything from the womb—the embryo is still in the Petri dish.”

Because we were troubled by what we saw coming in the stem cell debate and had concerns about some of the rhetoric that was more dream than substance, William Cutrer, M.D., and I co-authored a couple of medical novels titled Lethal Harvest (embryonic stem cell research) and Deadly Cure (adult stem cell research). We felt the issues were too complex to shoehorn into sound bites and deserved a much deeper exploration than pro-life/pro-choice divisions. The issues involve people’s lives and futures, hopes and dreams, and loves and losses.

The media and the medical/research community have consistently underreported the reality of successful treatments using adult stem cells. Meanwhile, they continue to tout the promise, the hope, of embryonic stem cell (ESC) research. My sis sent me an article yesterday that lists more than thirty-five cases in which patients have successfully been treated using adult stem cells. And we’re talking about big stuff: blindness, spinal cord injury, lupus, multiple sclerosis, cardiac function after heart attack. In some cases, the patient's own cells were used, which means no rejection issues, no lifetime of prednisone, no immunological nightmares. Want to see with your own eyes as someone walks again (thanks to adult stem cells) after twenty years immobilized by a spinal cord injury? It’s cool, but old—as in, back when Dan Rather was still anchoring. Where is all the hype that should have followed this story and numerous ones like it? Check out this link.

By George, the decision this week to oppose the use of U.S. tax dollars for embryonic stem cell research was bold and courageous. It was not a particularly smart political maneuver. But it was the right thing to do. The government does not belong in the business of making human life a hot commodity.