Saturday, March 14, 2009

I may be mistaken, but after all the "We will now fund

fetal stem cell research of all kinds" noise in the speech, doesn't this pretty much leave things just like the order Bush signed? If not more strict?
On Wednesday, only two days after he lifted President Bush’s executive order banning federal funding of stem cell research that requires the destruction of human embryos, President Barack Obama signed a law that explicilty bans federal funding of any “research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death.”
The provision was buried in the 465-page omnibus appropriations bill that Obama signed Wednesday. Known as the Dickey-Wicker amendment, it has been included in the annual appropriations bill for the Department of Health and Human Services every fiscal year since 1996.

The amendment says, in part: “None of the funds made available in this Act may be used for—(1) the creation of a human embryo or embryos for research purposes; or (2) research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death.”

...it also mandates that the government use an all-inclusive definition of “human embryo” that encompasses any nascent human life from the moment that life comes into being, even if created in a laboratory through cloning, in vitro fertilization or any other means
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Which means either the "We don't have time for you to read all this!" push caused this to get through without notice, or Obama knew it was there and just used the "I'm signing" press moment to showboat, knowing this was going to keep anything from really changing.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Since it has been in the budget bill every year since 1996, I'll go for "...Obama knew it was there and just used the "I'm signing" press moment to showboat...."

CU74

Anonymous said...

Another vote for the showboat.

Remember. He is concerned that we all think he is the light bringer and the anointed one.