Obama’s Disbanding Bioethics Council Shows He Wants a ‘Rubber Stamp’

Americans United for Life (AUL) criticized President Obama’s recent decision to disband the President’s Council on Bioethics and replace it with a new bioethics commission having a mandate to offer “practical policy options.”

The President’s Council on Bioethics was created in November 2001 by President Bush after his decision to allow human embryonic stem-cell research for the first time while limiting the research to existing cell lines.

“Why try to fix something that wasn’t broken?” said AUL’s President & CEO Charmaine Yoest.

Daniel McConchie, AUL Vice President of Government Affairs said, “This was the most balanced bioethics council in history with two leaders, Leon Kass and Edmund Pellegrino, who went out of their way to ensure the council was reflective of all the major perspectives on the issues,” he said. “We have to ask why the President has disbanded this effective and well-regarded council. Is this a move toward a council that is more of a rubber stamp of his administration’s priorities, rather than a group that actively debates current issues with all perspectives having a seat at the table?”

AUL Senior Counsel Clarke Forsythe said it was “a shame” that the council was dismissed. “The council leaves a rich legacy of reflection on the ethical and legal aspects of the most important questions of biomedicine and biotechnology facing the country. But despite the council’s balance — or perhaps because of it — many liberals and libertarians never appreciated the important books and reports published by the Council. When it conducted wide-ranging discussions of important bioethical issues, they dismissed it as a ‘debating society.’ And when, after such discussions, they issued policy recommendations, they dismissed it as ‘political.’”

If such a thoughtful and balanced bioethics council is to be disbanded, Forsythe said, the likelihood is that the President doesn’t want such thoughtful deliberation on bioethics or intends “to create a new council with only one, utilitarian ideology that will simply provide reasons to approve embryonic research, human cloning, et cetera.”

RELATED: Joe Carter comments at First Things on what he believes the Obama administration means by planning a new commission that will offer “practical policy options”:

In other words, the Obama administration already knows where it stands on all those pesky moral issues like human cloning, chimeras, and euthanasia, and just needs a group to provide advice on how to implement its preferred policies. Whereas the previous councils wrestled with such questions as “What is the nature of human dignity?” the new one will most likely be addressing more practical policy options, such as “How much should we pay women to harvest their eggs for cloning?”