Religious Americans Changing Minds on Stem Cell Research

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Peggy Willocks describes herself as a conservative, pro-life Christian in “the heart of the Bible Belt,” Johnson City, Tenn. So when she considered embryonic stem cell research two years ago, she found it morally repulsive. That view changed, as it has for other religious Americans. This religious support, or […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Peggy Willocks describes herself as a conservative, pro-life Christian in “the heart of the Bible Belt,” Johnson City, Tenn. So when she considered embryonic stem cell research two years ago, she found it morally repulsive.

That view changed, as it has for other religious Americans. This religious support, or lack of it, could be instrumental as Congress and President Bush grapple with a bill that would expand federal funding of medically promising embryonic stem cell research.


“I was equating it with killing a child,” said Willocks, 54, who now gives talks in support of such research. “I thought of it as grinding up fetuses and all of that, so I didn’t want any part of it.”

What changed Willocks was a personal experience.

She watched a friend and a fellow Parkinson’s sufferer get to where she could move only her eyes for two months before dying. Willocks then went back to her Bible, recalled God’s compassion for the living and determined that cells in a Petri dish aren’t sacred because Scripture informs her that “life begins in the womb,” she said.

Surveys show Willocks is not alone in her reassessment.

A Gallup poll taken in early May 2005 found that 60 percent of Americans say medical research involving stem cells from human embryos is “morally acceptable.” That’s up significantly from May 2002, when 52 percent held that opinion, according to Gallup research.

December 2004 polling data from the Washington-based Pew Research Center for the People and the Press points to a similar trend toward growing support over the past three years.

As with the abortion issue, much hinges on the moral status of biological material that could one day become a full-fledged human being. Although the moral concerns echo those of firmly entrenched factions in the abortion debate, conclusions reached in the stem cell debate are proving far more tenuous, even for people of faith.

In explaining the discrepancy, observers point to American pragmatism. Americans tingle at the prospect of curing previously deadly diseases, they say, and that potential to save lives has a way of making the protection of embryos a concern of lesser importance.

“The hope for medical breakthroughs is outweighing the destruction of embryos,” said Carroll Doherty, editor at the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. “Is there less concern for the embryo? I don’t think so. People are just feeling it’s worth it” to attain a greater good.


Pew polling shows the greatest surge in support among Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants, especially those who said they didn’t know what to think on the issue two years ago.

In March 2002, for instance, 43 percent of white Catholics said it was more important to conduct embryonic stem cell research than to protect embryos. By December 2004, that climbed to 63 percent. Among non-evangelical Protestants, the percentage prioritizing research grew from 51 percent to 69 percent over the same period.

Why would Catholics en masse change their moral convictions on this issue, but not on abortion?

“Abortion affects a fetus and a mom. Stem cell research potentially affects millions of people,” said James Walter, a Catholic professor of bioethics at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

With the exception of recent immigrants, said Walter, ordinary Catholics often take their moral cues from secular society rather than the church.

“Their instincts told them there is something problematic here,” said Walter, chair of The Bioethics Institute at Loyola.


But then came a wave of forward-looking reports on regenerative medicine.

“The press, the scientists and so on have been holding out to them a promise,” Walter said. “And that promise includes them, unlike the abortion issue. It offers them or their children potential benefits. And so they’re drawn to that. So their former sensibilities and attitudes are blunted, if not transformed in that.”

As Willocks’ change of heart shows, developments close to home can play a huge role.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., said he is “adamantly against abortion,” but he became a committed advocate for embryonic stem cell research after his wife gave birth to triplets last year via in vitro fertilization. He now believes that “a fertilized egg is not a human being until it is implanted in a mother’s womb.”

“I hadn’t thought it through too much before that,” Rohrabacher said in an interview. “I’d have to say my personal experience had a lot to do with my position. … To say `life begins at conception’ _ We have to realize that science now has made that phrase obsolete.”

The embryonic research bill passed in the House on May 24 but without enough votes to override an expected veto from President Bush, who on Tuesday (May 31) repeated his opposition to it.

At a news conference, Bush said “I’ll veto the bill as it now exists” because it would use “taxpapers’ monies for the use of experimentation that would destroy life.”


The bill would make new cell lines eligible for federally funded research and would include lines coming from embryos generated as byproducts of in vitro fertilization procedures. Federal policy currently bans the use of government funds for research on cell lines created after Aug. 9, 2001.

With other Republicans, Bush instead supports a measure to focus research on umbilical cords, which passed the House almost unanimously in May.

Among the general public, Pew polling from December shows opposition to embryonic research to be firmest among those who attend religious services weekly. In that group, 50 percent prioritized protecting the embryo, vs. 38 percent who said doing research is more important.

Yet even among this group, support for research is growing. In March 2002, only 28 percent had said research is more important than protecting embryos. Most of the new support in this group, Doherty said, is coming from those who were undecided in 2002.

Evangelicals tend to feel more strongly about a fetus in a womb than an embryo for several reasons, said David Fletcher, a philosophy professor and chair of the oversight committee for the Center for Applied Christian Ethics at Wheaton College.

In the abortion debate, he said, personal responsibility is at stake in their concern that “people shouldn’t be able to get away with having extramarital sex.” But feelings are different, he said, on “the question of what to do with these 400,000 or so embryos sitting in an ice box” and bound to be discarded one day.


“If you see (an embryo) magnified, it just looks like a raspberry,” Fletcher said. “We just don’t warm up to embryos. Especially if they’re in a freezer.”

MO/JL END RNS

Editors: Search the RNS photo Web site at https://religionnews.com for a photo of Peggy Willocks to accompany this story.

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