On Aug. 9, 2001, President Bush announced he would fund research only on those stem-cell lines taken from human embryos before that date. Bush's critics claimed he had sold out to the religious extremists in his party. But in a curious way, it's the moderation of his policy that has exposed him to the strongest intellectual attacks.
Critics have said his funding policy is too restrictive. But they ignore what Bush did not do: He did not outright prohibit the research, which would seem to be the obvious thing to do if he really believed that human embryos are human beings and that destroying them, by taking their stem cells, is a kind of killing. He did not regulate fertility clinics to make sure that they too refrained from destroying embryos. He did not even cut off funding altogether.
These omissions opened the door to Bush's opponents. His policies have been called inconsistent or even hypocritical. Bush's failure to take a tougher position on destroying embryos allegedly shows that his policy is not morally serious, but rather a gesture to his base -- and one that comes at the expense of all the sick people who could some day benefit from more research.
It's been hard even for Bush's allies to articulate a defense of the policy. What, after all, is the difference between taking stem cells from a human embryo on Aug. 8, 2001, and performing the same act on Aug. 10, 2001? Yet only the first set of stem cells is eligible for federal funding under Bush's policy.
The demand for perfect consistency should not, however, exclude the possibility of political prudence. A pro-life president can reasonably decide for the time being to largely leave alone well-entrenched evils, such as common fertility clinic practices, while combating new evils to which the country is not yet accustomed -- especially if the predictable consequence of tying the issues together would be defeat on both. It would be a curious sort of principle of political morality that required people who held it to act in self-defeating ways.
Bush's policy is also defensible as a way of avoiding complicity with evils that cannot be prohibited. By limiting the research subsidies to stem cells taken before the subsidies were announced, he does not reward or induce more embryo destruction. At the same time, he declines to make taxpayers who strongly object to the embryo-killing research pay for it.
