Current Legislative Action

Very soon there will be three very important pro-life votes in the US Senate, which then will bounce back to the house and hopefully to the President’s desk. An agreement has been reached unanimously by the Senate members to consider each one of the three legislative proposals. No amendments will be allowed. Each will take 60 senate votes to pass. Assuming passage in both Houses, each will go to the President. Two of these bills are excellent. One is a disaster. The two goods ones will be debated and voted on first.

They are:

S.3504, The Fetus Farming Prohibition Act. This would make it a federal offense for a researcher to use tissue from a human embryo, fetus or baby who has been gestated in a woman’s womb or an animal’s womb for the purpose of providing tissue for research. This has been proposed by Senator R. Santorum (R-PA), is an excellent bill and we strongly recommend its passage.

S.2754, The Alternative Pluripotent Stem Cell Therapies Enhancement Act. This would require the National Institutes of Health to support research to try to find methods of creating pluripotent stem cells without creating or killing living human embryos. These are cells that hopefully can be turned into any sort of body tissue.

HR810. This bill would require federal funding of research using stem cells obtained by killing human embryos. These are the well known embryonic stem cells. These are obtained by cutting open a five-day-old living human embryo and extracting these cells from the inside of his or her tiny body. This procedure kills this five-day-old human. The pro-life movement and most traditional religious bodies have strongly opposed this. Another major reason for opposing it is that to date there has not been a single human treatment using embryonic stem cells, whereas there are upwards of 70 major human problems that have been aided or cured by using adult stem cells or umbilical cord stem cells. These more successful cells can be obtained ethically as they come from the body of the person, are cultured, and returned to the body of that same person. In this process no one is killed. If HR810 is sent to the president he has promised to veto it.

Your Senators need to hear from the pro-life community immediately. Click here to obtain your Senators’ contact information. Take nothing for granted, for there is tremendous pressure on them by biotech industries and by the abortion industry. Two good bills (S.3504 and S.2754), one bad one (HR810), lets get on it.

Sincerely,
J.C. Willke, MD
President
Life Issues Institute
www.lifeissues.org

07/11/06