Nature Medicine | Spoonful of Medicine

For Bush’s stem cell decisions, seeing was believing

bushhand.jpgFormer US President George Bush has been making the talk show rounds to promote his new memoir, Decision Points. Rather than a chronological chronicle, Bush takes a more thematic approach, explaining the motivation behind some of his more controversial policy decisions. One telling anecdote describes how his mother, Barbara Bush, miscarried and enlisted her eldest son to drive her to the hospital. She brought the fetus in a jar with her (as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynocologists recommends, incidentally). Seeing the remains of his unborn sibling, Bush says, helped foment his pro-life worldview, which led to the compromise of funding stem cell research only for lines that had already been created by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).

“She says to her teenage kid, ’Here’s a fetus,’” Bush told NBC’s Matt Lauer. “No question that affected… my philosophy that we should respect life.”

In the controversy over stem cells, imagery is everything. When Bush vetoed a 2006 bill that increased funding for stem cell research, he surrounded himself with a group of families with ‘snowflake babies’ — adopted embryos from IVF clinics who, their presence implied, might have been candidates for use in stem cell research. To counter, stem cell research supporters have found it much more effective to punt on the moral issue, highlighting sick humans and pointing to promising research, rather than attempting to dehumanize the embryo. When Nancy Reagan appealed to Bush in 2004 to fund stem cell research, she made no mention of embryos, only of her husband, the former president, then wasting away with Alzheimer’s: “Ronnie’s long journey has finally taken him to a place where I can no longer reach him,” she wrote.

Image by Beverly & Pack via Flickr Creative Commons

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