Note to Team Moloch

With the Senate poised to review the House's latest attempt to compel taxpayer funding for research destructive of human embryos, the manufacturers of consent to taxpayer-funded destruction of embryos would be well advised to make sure that everyone on their team is using heartstring-plucking poster children with long-term viability. The Washington Post article on today's debate points out the problems with choosing the wrong mascot:

"Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who introduced the act with Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), drew particular attention to a 12-year-old diabetic girl he recently met, who he said must inject herself with insulin 120 times a month.

'If adult stem cells could provide a cure for juvenile diabetes, she'd gladly take it,' Harkin said, suggesting that only embryonic stem cells have the capacity to cure diabetes.

In research to be published in today's Journal of the American Medical Association, scientists from Brazil and the United States showed that adult stem cells may indeed help cure diabetes. In that study, 14 of 15 patients with early-onset Type 1 diabetes, once known as juvenile diabetes, could stop taking insulin after undergoing a procedure that partially destroyed their immune and blood systems and then reconstituted those systems with the help of stem cells that had been isolated from their blood in advance."

I'm sure notional Catholic Tom Harkin will seize upon this opportunity to reboot his thinking and get back on board Evangelium Vitae.