Monitoring Stem Cell Research 
69 
the present policy does not sufficiently distance the federal 
government from such destruction. “The federal government, 
for the first time in history, will support research that relies on 
the destruction of some defenseless human beings for the pos- 
sible benefit to others," one critic contended in the immediate 
wake of the August 9, 2001 announcement. “However such a 
decision is hedged about with qualifications, it allows our na- 
tion's research enterprise to cultivate a disrespect for human 
life."'^ 
A further critique of the policy on grounds of inconsistency 
focuses more particularly on specific elements of the implicit 
claim to non-complicity, discussed in the previous chapter. If, 
as many of its advocates argue, the policy takes embryo de- 
struction to be essentially a morally unjustifiable act, and if its 
provisions aim to make use of the irreversible consequences of 
that act without in any way encouraging or abetting the act 
itself, then, critics contend, it is curious that the policy would 
insist on requiring (in addition) that the eligible stem cell lines 
must have been obtained from embryos originally intended for 
reproduction and used with donor consent and without finan- 
cial inducements. If embryo destruction is in principle a 
wrong, and if the policy’s provisions seek only to keep the fed- 
eral government from complicity in that wrong, then why 
should it matter how precisely the wrong was originally com- 
mitted? The presence of these conditions, it is argued, sug- 
gests that the policy is not in fact based in a consistent and 
principled adherence to the proposition that human embryos 
should not be destroyed. Indeed, some have argued that this 
character of the policy suggests that its authors, including the 
President, may not hold the view that human embryos deserve 
the same protections as human children or adults. These crit- 
ics suggest not so much that the current policy is necessarily 
inconsistent, but that it may only be consistent with a view of 
human embryos as possessed of intermediate or indeterminate 
moral standing, rather than a view which holds that human 
embryos ought simply not to be destroyed for the benefit of 
others.®^ 
In response to these last arguments, some have suggested 
that the qualifying conditions included in the policy reflect a 
secondary commitment to long-standing principles of human- 
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