Statement of Administration Policy: S. 3504 - Fetus Farming Prohibition Act of 2006

STATEMENT OF ADMINISTRATION POLICY

(Senate)

(Sens. Santorum (R) PA and Brownback (R) KS)

The Administration strongly supports Senate passage of S. 3504, a bill to prohibit the solicitation or acceptance of tissue from human fetuses gestated and aborted solely for research purposes.

In this promising era of biotechnological advances, the Administration believes it is critical to establish key moral boundaries that will allow the nation to vigorously move forward with medical research, while also maintaining the highest ethical standards and respecting human dignity and life.

The destruction of nascent life for research not only violates the principle that no life should be taken for the benefit of another, but also opens up a path to further egregious abuses. Among these would be gestating human fetuses with the sole intent of aborting them to harvest their cells or tissues for scientific research. Some of the advances in animal experiments touted as demonstrating the utility of stem cell research, for instance, have in fact made use of cells derived not from embryo-stage animals, but from animal fetuses gestated, aborted, and harvested for cells and tissues.

It is imperative that human beings never be treated this way, and that clear boundaries against this and further abuses be drawn now. The President called on Congress to set such a boundary in his 2005 and 2006 State of the Union Addresses. This bill takes an important step toward doing so, and toward establishing the principle that scientific research must always respect the matchless value of every human life.