Dear Member of Congress

That’s how the letter began from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops with this appeal to the House of Representatives to address the vote the Democratic leadership is rushing through on embryonic stem cells. Specifically, funding of this destructive research with tax dollars.

Soon the House of Representatives will again vote on legislation (H.R. 3) to promote the destruction of human embryos to obtain their stem cells. Again supporters of this legislation will seek to ensure that no other avenue of stem cell research is considered or approved. Again they will ignore or dismiss the mounting evidence that research posing no moral problem will be more immediately beneficial for patients with devastating diseases. And once again, ironically, supporters will accuse those who disagree of being obstructionist and narrow-minded, of failing to support all possible avenues for medical progress.

Yet this is not a matter of supporting vs. opposing progress. The question is whether our technical progress will be guided by an equally advanced sense of the dignity of each and every human life, so that our technology becomes a servant to humanity and not our cruel master. The technological imperative – the conviction that if some interesting research avenue or procedure exists, then it must be pursued whatever the moral and human cost – has governed this debate for far too long.

And with no valid or coherent explanation, in the face of facts.

The sad reality is that many promising avenues of medical progress have received inadequate funding and attention on the road to human treatments. This is due in part to an exaggerated and almost exclusive focus on destructive embryo research in the political and policymaking arena. Even the national cord blood stem cell bank that Congress approved a year ago, which could benefit many thousands of Americans immediately, has received minimal funding.

For more information on these and other aspects of this issue, I would encourage you to contact the U.S. bishops’ Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities at prolife@usccb.org.

That is, if you’re interested in learning the truth.

In considering your vote on H.R. 3, then, I urge you first to consider the fundamental moral line Congress would cross if it approves this legislation. The federal government has never taken the crass utilitarian approach of forcing taxpayers to support the direct killing of innocent human life, at any stage of development, in the name of “progress.” Secondly I urge you to vote against H.R. 3 for the sake of genuine progress for suffering patients, who deserve better solutions than this most speculative and most divisive type of stem cell research. Please reject H.R. 3, and support medical progress that we can all live with.

For those who choose the “crass utilitarian approach” and call themselves Catholic, let the bishops and the electorate take notice.