What else the stem cell order did

It’s big news that President Obama reversed President Bush’s policy on embryonic stem cell research and opened it up for federal funding.

With the stroke of a pen, President Obama cleared the way Monday for the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies to fund research using all kinds of human embryonic stem cells.

The power of the pen. Under the Bush administration, Congress twice passed measures that would have broadened access to embryonic stem cells for research, and he vetoed both, preserving the moral ethics of holding the line on human experimentation.

Unlike the bills Bush vetoed, however, Obama’s action did not replace the existing policy with another set of boundaries grounded in a different ethical calculus. Instead, Obama eliminated the Bush policy and then took the unusual and provocative step of also rescinding Bush’s 2007 executive order providing support for alternative sources of stem cells — an order that in no way limited embryonic stem-cell research and need not have been retracted. Having lifted these restrictions, Obama put no rules or boundaries of any kind in their place, instructing the scientists at the National Institutes of Health to do so on his behalf over the next few months. Obama’s executive order makes no mention of any moral qualm about the destruction of human embryos — whether left over from fertility treatments or created especially for experimentation, including human embryos created by cloning.

Bottom line:

With this week’s executive order, Obama has not so much staked out a position in the embryo debate as dismissed the debate itself as unnecessary.

That cannot be accomplished with the stroke of a pen.