Obama doesn’t want their advice

In spite of promises to listen to many viewpoints in an open and honest dialogue over tough issues, President Obama wants none of it on bioethical issues. So, though the services of the longstanding President’s Council on Bioethics are certainly needed in this ‘brave new world’, they are not welcomed.

Within the recesses of the US Department of Health and Human Services, the President’s Council on Bioethics quietly went about its work, as it had done, under various titles and different mandates, for over 30 years. However, during the week of June 8, 2009, council members received letters from President Obama letting them know their services were no longer required. The present council will be shutting its doors.

Not related to HHS, but only housed there for administrative reasons, the present council was established by President George W. Bush’s executive order in November 2001…

With a new president in office now, the present bioethics council’s term was set to expire on September 30, 2009. The abrupt early disbanding of the council led to the cancelation of a meeting planned for late June, which was to include, among other things, reflections from council members on “The Future of National Bioethics Commissions.”

According to a White House deputy press spokesman, President Obama will appoint a new bioethics commission, one with a “new mandate” which “offers practical policy options.”

After letters were sent out disbanding the membership of the present council, President Obama’s press office stated that the membership chosen by President Bush was considered to be “a philosophically leaning advisory group.”

That’s a misrepresentation.

According to the Times, White House press officer Cherlin said the Bush council “favored discussion over developing a shared consensus.”

Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton and a member of Bush’s council, agrees with this assessment, saying that from its inception, Bush asked that the council offer a variety of views on any given issue rather than try to reach consensus in their deliberations.

Isn’t Obama always insisting on dialogue? Discussion is bi-partisan, fair and reasoned. It’s open to opposing views, rather than rubber-stambing an ideology.

George suggested that during the Bush presidency, the media and others believed the council membership favored Bush’s conservative religious leanings. But George denied that theory, saying that the council chaired by Leon Kass “was the most intellectually and ideologically diverse bioethics advisory body ever constituted.”

Writing in January 2009 for the Witherspoon Institute on its website, Public Discourse, George explained that the notion that the makeup of the council was heavily weighted toward “religious conservatives” under President Bush was a false assumption. In fact, almost half of the 18 members disagreed with many of the president’s stances on key issues; several members had voted for Al Gore in the previous presidential election.

Furthermore, on the issue of embryonic stem-cell research alone, six of the members supported the creation and destruction of human embryos for research purposes, one was in favor of revoking Bush’s funding restrictions on using frozen embryos from fertilization clinics for research, and three other members were unopposed to “therapeutic cloning,” George wrote.

Members of that council had great respect for each other’s views and ability to engage the debates fairly and honorably.

Both chairmen (Dr. Leon Kass and Dr. Edmund Pelligrino) are well-respected among their peers, even those who disagree philosophically with them. According to fellow bioethicist Tom L. Beauchamp—who is a liberal by his own admission—Pelligrino is “scrupulously fair in attempting to understand and react to an opponent’s positions. He will meet the issues head-on, and he deserves the same respect from the bioethics community that I have always seen him accord to others.” 

Dr. Kass’ approach to the council’s deliberations was demonstrated in a teleconference in May 2005 with members of the media, in which he discussed the council’s considerations of the controversy over alternative sources of human pluripotent stem cells.

He stated that even though there was a split recommendation on the ethics of doing cloning for biomedical research, the council agreed that all parties in the debate “have concerns vital to defend, vital not only to themselves but to all of us” and that no one “can afford to be callous to the needs of suffering humanity, or cavalier about the treatment of nascent human life, or indifferent to the social effects of adopting one course of action rather than another,” he emphasized.

As members of a national bioethics body, Kass explained, “we are mindful of the need to understand and respect the strongly held ethical views of our fellow citizens even when we do not share them.” He stated that they would be receptive “to any creative, scientific, or technical suggestions that might find a way around this ethical dilemma and ethical impasse we face, [enabling] scientists to proceed with their research in ways that neither raise ethical questions nor violate the ethical principles of many Americans.”

This is the council Obama decided to shut down.

Lawler fears that in Obama’s concept of the President’s Council, “there’s no need for such moral and political discussion, because the experts know the non-ideological and objective answers to the questions that face us in our high-tech and increasingly biotech world.” In this world, he said, “personal opinion is trumped by what the ‘studies show,’ while public opinion should be guided toward a consensus based on those studies.”

Back in January, Princeton Professor Robert George, one of the esteemed members of the now-disbanded council, wrote  in Public Discourse – prophetically as it turns out – about the uncertain future of an Obama bioethics advisory commission. And how the public would even know how it’s conducting such critical matters as ethic and science.

During the recent campaign, many conservative pundits complained that the media was in the tank for Obama. It looks like we will now get a straightforward and decisive test of the media’s objectivity. Writers such as Rick Weiss of the Washington Post were wrong about Bush. He did not stack his bioethics council with people who agreed with him. What if Obama does just that, though? Will the public be told? Or will the media apply a double standard? If Obama stacks his council with social liberals, will the contrast with the Bush council be noted? Or will the media implicitly adopt the view that a council stacked with liberals isn’t really “stacked”?

Regardless of what the media does, future Republican and conservative presidents should be guided by Obama’s decision. If he follows Bush’s lead and appoints a diverse council, they should do the same. His decision would ratify a certain way—entirely noble—of using bioethics advisory councils to enhance the overall quality of deliberation and debate. If, however, Obama repudiates Bush’s openness to permitting a range of voices on the council, including a fair representation of dissenters from his own views, then future Republican and conservative presidents should not allow themselves to be played as fools. Obama will have established different terms for conducting the debate—terms according to which the role of bioethics councils is to advance the president’s own preordained agenda on bioethics questions, not to provide thoughtful argumentation enriched by the inclusion of perspectives that are critical of the president’s beliefs.

Two concluding thoughts. One, as George states in the next sentence, ‘when liberals thought that’s what Bush had done, they cried foul.’ They likely will not do so if Obama actually does it. And two….Obama has so far shown little tolerance for “perspectives that are critical of the president’s beliefs”, now that he is president.