62 
Ethical and Policy Developments 
from 1977 to 1991, dealing with abortion and government fund- 
ing, established the principle that the Constitution does not 
require the government to fund even those activities that the 
Constitution protects.^"^ Because the only issue in the present 
debate is one of federal funding, the protected status of scien- 
tific activity seems not to be a determining factor.^^ 
Finally, some critics of the case for a paramotmt right to re- 
search point again to the fact that scientific research — 
conducted both with private and (especially) with government 
funding — is already subject to certain restrictions, particularly 
with regard to protecting human subjects. The proposition that 
embryo research should not be subject to the same restrictions 
hinges on an argument about the standing of human embryos, 
rather than about the unrestrictable standing of research as 
such.^® Once more, an important part of the question turns on 
the status of extra-uterine human embryos. 
C. The Moral Standing of Human Embryos 
However they approach the matter, then, many people en- 
gaged in the debate over federal funding policy find they must 
consider the fundamental question of the moral standing of 
human embryos: What are early human embryos, and how 
should we regard them morally? Approaches to the question of 
federal funding of embryonic stem cell research that propose 
some other guiding principle — ^relief of suffering, freedom of 
research — seem almost by necessity to assume that human 
embryos do not possess the same human moral standing as 
persons already bom.^^ Conversely, if human embryos ought 
rightly to be treated as inviolable — as some have argued — 
then questions of balancing other goods or giving priority to 
other principles are largely rendered moot. Thus, to many ob- 
servers, some of the central questions in this arena would ap- 
pear to be those that surround human embryos: How ought we 
to think about and act toward human embryos? Should all ex 
vivo human embryos be treated the same, or are some, be- 
cause of their circumstances, origins, or prospects, to be 
treated differently from others? Or are embryos of sufficiently 
little moral significance that we should simply decide the fund- 
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