Poor President Obama. He makes a big deal of signing legislation declaring it open season on embryos and then just two days later he, perhaps unwittingly, signed legislation buried in his humongous Omnibus bill that outright makes federal funding of the destruction of human embryos illegal. Oops.
CNS:
On Wednesday, only two days after he lifted President Bush’s executive order banning federal funding of stem cell research that requires the destruction of human embryos, President Barack Obama signed a law that explicitly bans federal funding of any “research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death.”
The provision was buried in the 465-page omnibus appropriations bill that Obama signed Wednesday. Known as the Dickey-Wicker amendment, it has been included in the annual appropriations bill for the Department of Health and Human Services every fiscal year since 1996.
So now, it seems that many Democrats and some Republicans are so eager to begin fund the destroying of embryos that they may write up legislation to to overturn Dickey-Wicker. Should be an interesting vote. I, for one, appreciate an up and down vote. Let’s see where they stand. We will know them by their vote.
March 16, 2009 at 3:20 am
Correct me if I’m wrong. Wasn’t this bill the same one he promised to go over line by line? If so then I guess he knew of this item and is a prolifer at heart because we all know he’s the man of “change” and would never ever lie to us!
March 16, 2009 at 3:34 am
Ooh, a bit of a Dickey-Wicker for the Pres., eh, old bean? Too bad he hasn’t a Jeeves waiting to bail him out; the situation could go from bad to Wooster.
(I’m sorry. Really, I am.) 😉
March 16, 2009 at 3:45 am
Fascinatingly (at least to me), PG Wodehouse spent his final years in a house just on down the road from mine.
March 16, 2009 at 4:40 am
No need to repeal the Dickey-Wicker amendment — it was “reinterpreted” under Clinton. You know…the guy who doesn’t think embryos are fertilized.
If you don’t want to click the link, the reinterpretation is that, basically, the gov can still fund the research as long as the embryos are destroyed before funding begins. So you have to inseminate the egg and kill it on your dime — everything after that is on ours.
God Bless,
Ryan
March 16, 2009 at 1:49 pm
What a tangled web, huh?
March 16, 2009 at 2:43 pm
D’OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH!!!!
(in my best fake Homer Simpson accent possible – followed by the crushing of a can of Duff against the forehead)
March 16, 2009 at 9:35 pm
Dickey-Wicker is what forced the NIH to use embryos from the IVF.
It was written into the budget back in 1995.
It doesn’t stop anything.