President Bush used his veto power for the first time July 19, rejecting a bill that would have funded stem cell research that destroys embryos.
As promised, the President vetoed the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act, which would have weakened his policy barring federal grants for experiments that result in the destruction of human embryos. Bush’s rule allows funds for research only on embryonic stem cell lines already in existence when his policy was announced in 2001.
Congress has virtually no chance of overriding Bush’s veto, which came halfway through his sixth year in the White House. In action July 18, the Senate approved the measure 63-37, four votes short of the two-thirds majority needed for an override. Last year, the House of Representatives passed the bill, H.R. 810, with a 238-194 vote, about 50 votes short of a two-thirds majority.
In addition to vetoing H.R. 810, Bush signed into law the Fetus Farming Prohibition Act, S. 3504, which bars the acceptance of tissue from an embryo implanted or developed in a woman or animal for research purposes.
The President announced his veto of the embryonic stem cell funding bill by saying it crossed a “moral boundary that our decent society needs to respect.”
“If this bill would have become law, American taxpayers would, for the first time in our history, be compelled to fund the deliberate destruction of human embryos. And I’m not going to allow it,” Bush said.
“I made it clear to the Congress that I will not allow our nation to cross this moral line,” he said in a 15-minute speech. “Crossing the line would needlessly encourage a conflict between science and ethics that can only do damage to both and to our nation as a whole. If we’re to find the right ways to advance ethical medical research, we must also be willing, when necessary, to reject the wrong ways.”
Bush announced his actions in the White House’s East Room to an audience that included 18 families with “snowflake” children they adopted as embryos in storage at fertility clinics, four families who donated embryos to other families, and four people who have been treated with non-embryonic stem cells, which do not harm donors.
“Each of these children began his or her life as a frozen embryo that was created for in vitro fertilization but remained unused after the fertility treatments were complete,” the President said of the children who surrounded him. “These boys and girls are not spare parts. They remind us of what is lost when embryos are destroyed in the name of research. They remind us that we all begin our lives as a small collection of cells. And they remind us that in our zeal for new treatments and cures, America must never abandon our fundamental morals.”