Innocuous?

The Senate is set to vote on three stem cell bills next week, which are all likely to pass, though the one that would lift restrictions on embryonic stem cell research will prompt Bush’s first veto. Bush is instead throwing his support behind the other two, one of which would ban “‘fetal farming,’ or the creation of embryos for the purpose of harvesting their tissue for research,” and one of which, sponsored by the odious Rick Santorum, which would “promot[e] stem-cell research that doesn’t harm embryos.”

Many senators — including Frist — plan to vote for all three bills, saying they are not contradictory. Sen. Arlen Specter (R., Pa.), lead sponsor of the bill lifting the limits on embryonic stem-cell research, also is a sponsor of the Santorum bill. Some critics of the Santorum bill, including Sen. Richard Durbin (D., Ill.), think it’s “innocuous” but will vote for it anyway.

Is it really innocuous? One of the primary issues surrounding embryonic stem cell research is whether embryos harvested for in-vitro fertilization, which the parents then decline to use, can be donated for research instead of simply being destroyed. A bill that seeks to promote research that doesn’t harm embryos has the two-fold effect of making the attainment of embryo donation rights (reproductive choice) that much more difficult and (and as a result of) suggesting, even abstractly, that the status of personhood should be conferred upon embryos.

In a very real way, Santorum’s bill is the epitome of the anti-choice movement, using the subterfuge of a seemingly “innocuous” bit of legislation to inch just that tiniest bit closer to recognizing fetal personhood and thusly fetal rights. What is the purpose of promoting research that doesn’t harm embryos, no less the motivation, if not a tacit regard for the embryo as a rights-bearing subject? There’s a reason we don’t have any Senators advocating the same rules for donating cadavers to medical schools.