Snowflakes

Time Magazine writer Margaret Carlson lays the whole stem cell issue on the line, and so I include a recent column she contributed to Bloomberg. Please note that she is also writing from the heart. She has a son with cerebral palsy.

Snowflakes’ Cloud Debate on Stem-Cell Bill


By Margaret Carlson

June 9 (Bloomberg) -- Watching the Sunday morning talk shows can usually be done in the midst of reading newspapers, minding children and fixing breakfast. But when Republican Senators Sam Brownback of Kansas and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania met recently on ABC's ``This Week,'' the conversation was far too riveting for such distractions.

The topic was legislation that would relax restrictions on federal funding of stem-cell research, which might bring cures for cancer, Alzheimer's and other life-crippling diseases. The bill, which passed the House and has majority support in the Senate, would make available for research some 400,000 frozen embryos that were created for in vitro fertilization.

Debating Specter, Brownback invoked the right's newest rallying cry -- ``snowflakes,'' -- the moniker meaning ``frozen and unique'' given to babies born from embryos left over at fertility clinics. At a press conference, President George W. Bush showcased children wearing T-shirts emblazoned with ``this embryo was not discarded'' to drive home his point that embryos have the same status as a child.

When Specter expressed doubt that life is truly present in a petri dish, Brownback shot back that Specter should ask the snowflakes: ``That's where their life did start.''

Specter, whose voice is hoarse and head is bald from treatment for Hodgkin's lymphoma, snapped, ``Well, Sam, I'm a lot more concerned at this point about when my life is going to end.''

Snowflakes vs. Hope

And that's where the debate stands -- snowflakes vs. Specter's hope for a cure for his and (many others') diseases.

I didn't think it would get here. In 2001, Bush limited Bill Clinton's policy, in place but not yet operative, which would have given federal funds to the creation of new stem cells. Bush heralded those stem cell lines that already existed as all that researchers would need and forbade the destruction of any more embryos for research.

In outlining his decision, Bush was careful to go no further than he needed. He talked of ``potential life'' and mentioned IVF clinics approvingly as helping ``so many couples conceive children.'' He avoided one big fact: IVF clinics were creating embryos by the thousands, even though most would be destroyed.

Bush played the politics just perfectly. It's one thing to take on victims of Parkinson's and quite another to tangle with the thousands of couples who don't want government coming between them and their fertility treatments.

Sidestep, Dig In

In the ensuing four years, however, even conservative Republicans began asking: If Bush can countenance IVF clinics, surely a relative few of those embryos that are going to be discarded anyway could be used in a quest to cure diseases of the living.

Bush's response is to sidestep the question and dig in. Perhaps it's because he wakes up every morning wondering what his evangelical base wants from him that day. Perhaps it's that he thinks he can bring back some of the strays in his own party, like Orrin Hatch, by turning specks into people.

I'd like Brownback to turn his inquisition about when life begins on Bush. If Bush believes that life in the petri dish is equivalent to my brother with cerebral palsy, I want to hear it with my own ears.

Veto Threat

If the bill passes, Bush says he'll veto it (the first veto of his presidency), and that will virtually end federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research. The existing lines he spoke of in 2001 aren't enough. There are state efforts, but medical breakthroughs, like the Salk polio vaccine, happen with federal money. Without federal research, there's no help for Specter or his children or their children.

Bush also avoids what his elevation of embryos means for IVF clinics storing those 400,000 dot-sized particles in refrigerator cases. If embryos are people, under Bush's dictum couples should create only as many as they would use. IVF would be crippled.

And that's where snowflakes come in. They help Bush put off a confrontation with infertile couples who don't want the government telling them how to get pregnant. The idea of snowflakes makes it okay to create surplus embryos: They aren't going to be destroyed; they're going to be adopted.

That's poppycock: Embryo adoption is minuscule. Even if it increased dramatically, there would still be hundreds of thousands of embryos sitting in clinics -- or displaced persons camps, if you believe the rhetoric of a tiny, vocal segment of Bush's party.

What I'd like to see is Brownback pound on Bush about when life starts. When he was governor of Texas, Bush didn't believe it started in a lab. Polls show people don't want government in Terri Schiavo's hospice room, a gay person's bedroom or at the pharmacy saying who should get birth control pills or medical marijuana. Government should stay where it belongs, in the research lab.

Margaret Carlson , who was a columnist and deputy Washington bureau chief for Time magazine.