| U.S. News

Thanks to an upcoming ballot initiative, voters in strongly pro-life Missouri will have a say on the matter.

It’s one thing for California’s largely liberal voters, despite opposition from Catholic leaders and the state’s antiabortion lobby, to approve $3 billion in spending over 10 years on embryonic stem cell research, as they did in November 2004. And state funding for similar programs in the bright blue Democratic states of New Jersey, Connecticut and Maryland says little about national sentiment on the issue.

But conservative Missouri, home to a governor and two senators who consistently oppose abortion rights and where the moniker “Democrat” does not automatically equal “pro-choice,” is the electoral laboratory for a political experiment: an effort to extinguish the link in the public mind between abortion and embryonic stem cell research.

This November, Missouri citizens will vote “yes” or “no” on the Missouri Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative, an amendment to the state’s constitution that will allow, with some restrictions, stem cell research and access to stem cell therapies and cures.

“The country is watching and we are aware of it because this is a conservative pro-life state,” says Jaci Winship, executive director of Missourians Against Human Cloning. “If it passed here, someone will try it real soon in a state near you,” Winship told National Catholic Reporter.

Nationally, the antiabortion movement is splintered over embryonic stem cell research. Such pro-life groups as the National Right to Life Committee, the American Life League, Concerned Women for America and the U.S. Catholic bishops say the destruction of embryos that is inherent in the research is the moral equivalent of aborting an unborn child.

“Every human life, from the first moment of existence until natural death, deserves our respect and protection,” Richard M. Doerflinger, deputy director of the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told the House Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space in late 2004. It’s a message Doerflinger and other church spokespersons have repeated in countless forums.

“Human life has intrinsic dignity, not only a relative or instrumental value; thus every living member of the human species, including the human embryo, must be treated with the respect due to a human person,” Doerflinger told the House panel. He compared embryonic stem cell research to Nazi-era medical experimentation, syphilis experiments conducted more than 40 years on Alabama sharecroppers, the direct injection of the hepatitis virus in the 1960s into children living at a home for the mentally retarded, and U.S. government studies of military personnel and others unwittingly exposed to radiation from nuclear tests.

But others with strong antiabortion credentials say their support for embryonic stem-cell research is evidence of their pro-life commitment. Such pro-life stalwarts as Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch (author of the early 1980s “Human Life Amendment”) and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a conservative doctor with his eye on the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, support federal funding on embryonic stem cell research.

“After much thought, reflection and prayer, I concluded that life begins in, and requires, a nurturing womb,” Hatch told his Senate colleagues during a July 18 debate. “Human life does not begin in a petri dish,” said Hatch. He continued, “I do not question that an embryo is a living cell. But I do not believe that a frozen embryo in a fertility clinic freezer constitutes human life.”

The following day, Bush vetoed legislation that would have expanded funding for embryonic stem cell research beyond the limited research he approved in August 2001. Under the vetoed legislation, said Bush, “American taxpayers for the first time in our history would be compelled to fund the deliberate destruction of human embryos. Crossing this line would be a grave mistake and would needlessly encourage a conflict between science and ethics that can only do damage to both and harm our nation as a whole.”

Earlier that week, Bush spokesman Tony Snow used another term to describe embryonic stem cell research.

“The president believes strongly that for the purpose of research it’s inappropriate for the federal government to finance something that many people consider murder; he’s one of them,” Snow told a White House press briefing. Several days later Snow retracted the comment, saying he “overstepped his brief” and “murder” is not a characterization the president would use.

Rhetoric among supporters of the federal funding measure was equally heated. New York Sen. Charles Schumer took issue with those who oppose federal funding. “The trouble with this group, which I call the theocrats, is they want their faith to dictate what the government does. That, in ...