Bishops Urge House to Nix Stem Cell Bill

Predictably, as the changed political climate on Capitol Hill could clear the way for more stem cell research, religious groups are weighing in.

The U.S. bishops Wednesday drafted a letter urging the House of Representatives to reject a bill that would lift the ban on using federal funds to support embryonic stem cell research.

In the Jan. 9 letter from Cardinal Justin Rigali, chairman of the Bishops’ Committee for Pro-Life Activities, the religious leaders urged the lawmakers to instead give greater support for more promising and morally acceptable research, which they said includes harvesting stem cells from adult tissues and from the byproducts of live birth, including cord blood, amniotic fluid and placentas.

The sad reality is that many promising avenues of medical progress have received inadequate funding and attention on the road to human treatments, Rigali said in the letter. This is due in part to an exaggerated and almost exclusive focus on destructive embryo research in the political and policymaking arena. Even the national cord blood stem cell bank that Congress approved a year ago, which could benefit many thousands of Americans immediately, has received minimal funding.

Some religious groups oppose embryonic stem cell research on the grounds that an embryo is destroyed in order to harvest the stem cells, but backers of the research argue that the cells are taken from embryos that were already discarded, and that embryonic stem cells are the most robust for creating new cell types.