President Bush Finally Vetoes Something

I'm thrilled he made his stand on the embryonic-stem-cell-funding bill. And I'm thrilled the House couldn't override the veto.

Proponents of embryonic stem cell research are either badly misinformed about stem cells, or they're ghouls.

Embryonic stem cells come from human embryos. Human. They're what you were and I was as we developed into tiny babies who could breathe on our own. Human. And you kill those human embryos when you take their stem cells. I won't even get into the whole ethical question of exploiting young women to get their eggs to make the embryos that get killed to get their stem cells. To research procedures that don't work very well and are full of harmful side-effects, when adult and cord-blood stem cells work very well and are treating diseases right now without side-effects. Here's one of my posts that goes into some detail on the effectiveness of adult stem cell treatments (the first part is about a woman who woke up from a coma).

We certainly don't need to spend federal tax money to fund research that involves killing human embryos. If the procedure is so promising, let its proponents invest their own money in the research. Privately funded stem cell research is perfectly legal (though I wish it weren't).

The president believes strongly that for the purpose of research, it's inappropriate for the federal government to finance something that many people consider murder. He's one of them," said White House spokesman Tony Snow.

Bush argued that the bill would have crossed a line and "once crossed, we would find it impossible to turn back."

At the same time, Bush announced he had signed another bill, passed unanimously in the House and Senate, that would pre-emptively ban "fetal farming," the prospect of raising and aborting fetuses for scientific research.

Here's the full text of President Bush's letter to the House after he vetoed the bill.

We don't kill people so we can use their body parts to help someone else. Embryos and fetuses become people to, and it's wrong to kill them for their body parts or for research. Especially when we already have a better source of stem cells that don't require the death of anyone.