Current Federal Law and Policy 
35 
duction and obtained with consent and without financial in- 
ducements. In these ways, the policy gives some due to com- 
peting moral and prudential demands. But the policy’s central 
feature — ^the announcement date separating eligible from 
ineligible stem cell lines — holds firm to the principle that pub- 
lic funds should not be used to encourage or support the de- 
struction of embryos in the future. 
It is perhaps worth pointing out that one’s attitude regard- 
ing the best federal funding policy is not simply determined by 
one’s view regarding the moral standing of human embryos, 
and that even persons who hold the same view of the moral 
standing of human embryos may not all agree on the best 
policy. For example, support for the current policy does not 
necessarily require a belief that human embryos are persons 
with full moral standing; and conversely, those who believe 
that human embryos are persons do not necessarily support 
the policy. One might believe, for instance, that an embryo is a 
mystery, not clearly “one of us’’ but unambiguously a life-in- 
process, and thus conclude that we should err on the side of 
restraint (non-destruction) when moral certainty is impossible. 
Or, one might believe that embryos are not simply persons but 
are nonetheless either worthy of protection from harm or at 
least worthy of more respect than ordinary human tissues or 
animals, and that it would be wrong to begin a massive public 
project of embryo research that offends the deeply-held beliefs 
of many citizens. Meanwhile, an individual who believes that 
human embryos have the same moral standing as children or 
adults may be deeply unsatisfied with the present policy, 
since merely denying federal encouragement for future embryo 
destruction while taking no action to prevent privately-funded 
stem cell research that destroys embryos may be an insuffi- 
cient response to the ongoing destruction of nascent human 
life. 
For some of its supporters, the policy goes as far as it seems 
possible to go within the bounds of the spirit and aims of the 
law — ^that the government should not encourage or support 
the destruction of nascent human life for research. Yet at the 
same time, it goes farther than the federal government has 
gone before in the direction of actually funding research in- 
volving human embryos, since no public funds had ever before 
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