Last week, once again, George Bush vetoed a bill from the Senate in the United States that would expand funding for Embryonic Stem Cell research. He used his mantra that “Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical, and it is not the only option before us”.

He focusses on this kind of dogma because it is a convenient smokescreen. He is pro-life and anti-abortion and there is no ambiguity about his position. However, there is clear ambiguity (sic?) about his position on Embryonic Stem Cell research. He is happy enough to fund research on existing cell lines, however, he doesn’t want to see funding being made available for the construction of new cell lines.

The issue is and, I believe, the dishonesty in Bush’s argument centres on where these cell lines would come from.

There are currently approximately 500,000 embryos at the blastocyst stage in freezers in hospitals in the United States alone. I don’t know the numbers for Ireland. In most cases these embryos will never be used for IVF. In many cases, all contact with the donors is not lost, in many cases the donors choose not to go forward with any more implantations, perhaps for medical reasons, perhaps because their family is now complete. The fact is that the vast majority of these embryos will be destroyed sometime in the next five years. They will be destroyed because we know that an embryo that is implanted into a woman after spending five years in a freezer has a strong likelihood of severe developmental disorders and likely spontaneous abortion. Therefore, the ethicists are explicitly against implanting these embryos, given the likelihood of such problems.

So, these embryos will never become children or adult humans.

The options are the following for these embryos (there are only two options):

1. The embryos will be destroyed.
2. The embryos will be destroyed but beforehand, the stem cells from the centre of this ball of cells will be removed, used in stem cell research and potentially will have an important role to play in the provision of a reasonable quality of life for millions of people.