Guidelines Needed to Enforce People's Vote
The Michigan Senate, by a vote of 25-12, approved a bi-partisan package of bills designed to implement the constitutional amendment adopted by Michigan voters allowing live human embryos to be destroyed for research purposes. Proposal 2 of 2008 contained a series of requirements for allowing embryos created for infertility treatment to be donated for research. The legislation passed today ensures that those requirements are backed up in law with definitions and penalties.
Right to Life of Michigan President Barbara Listing said, "The debate over Proposal 2 is behind us. The Legislature's job is to properly implement and enforce the proposal. Voters approved this measure expecting research would be limited to only excess human embryos, that there would be no buying or selling of human embryos and that parents would consent to their embryos being used for research."
Advocates of the research have falsely claimed that the bills would restrict the ability of researchers to use the stem cell lines they create after destroying the embryos. Nothing in the bills restricts what researchers can do with the stem cells once they are harvested. An analysis of the Michigan bills shows that they are less burdensome than state regulations in California and Massachusetts, the two leading states in stem cell research.
Listing said, "The bi-partisan vote in the Senate demonstrates that the opposition to this legislation is little more than deceptive rhetoric, much like we saw in the Proposal 2 campaign. Research will not be affected by the basic oversight called for in these bills. If we do not put these measures into effect, we will have the unregulated and unrestricted scientific experimentation we warned about in 2008."
