Opponents of embryonic stem-cell research get good news, bad news

Published: 2006-02-10

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- The first weeks of 2006 brought good news and bad news for opponents of embryonic stem-cell research, as a bill that would have encouraged the research in Delaware got significant revisions but new proposals supporting it cropped up in New Jersey and Michigan. In Florida, competing initiatives on taxpayer funding for embryonic stem-cell research each failed to gain the 611,000 signatures needed to place it on the state's November ballot; the Florida bishops had backed a proposal to prohibit such research. The heads of Virginia's two Catholic dioceses also issued a joint pastoral letter on "Science at the Service of Life," in which they called embryonic stem-cell research both unethical and unproven. The Delaware effort to block a bill that would have given state sanction to embryonic stem-cell research was led by a grass-roots group called A Rose and a Prayer. After the House approved a drastically amended version of the bill in January, Stephen Jenkins, a Wilmington attorney who helped form the organization late last year, said it would now seek to ban all research on embryos in the state, along with all forms of human cloning.

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