Two years ago, when the White House announced the formation of the President’s Council on Bioethics, there was some initial controversy over whether the panel would have the courage to take on controversies with an objective, independent eye.
The White House insisted that politics was irrelevant. The council’s field of inquiry — including embryo and stem cell research, cloning, human genetics and neurosciences — was too important, we were told, for partisan agendas.
On Jan. 16, 2002, a White House statement read:
The Council’s paramount objective will be to develop a deep understanding of the issues that it considers and to advise the President of the complex and often competing moral positions associated with biomedical innovation. The President has assembled a diverse group of individuals to address these matters, who will bring a variety of perspectives to these challenging issues. Council members have been chosen not only for their specialized knowledge, but also for their thoughtfulness and their devotion to serious ethical inquiry.
The statement didn’t say, “Dissenters who may challenge Bush’s ‘deep understanding’ with ideas he disagrees with shouldn’t bother to participate,” but it should have. That was the policy all along.
Friday afternoon, Bush fired a scientist and a moral philosopher from his Council on Bioethics because they dared to challenge the administration orthodoxy on human embryo research, reinforcing the obvious fact that politics will trump science whenever it’s convenient for Bush. (Is the White House even capable of letting a Friday afternoon go by without doing something offensive?)
Not surprisingly, the two fired council members are being replaced by three new members who will toe the administration line on bioethical controversies.
When asked about the dismissals, the White House said the two members’ terms had expired in January. That’s true, but it fails to mention that all of the council members’ terms expired in January and yet only two — the ones who were brave enough to voice dissent on behalf of science — were fired.
When the Washington Post’s Rick Weiss pressed for a more detailed explanation, a White House spokeswoman said, “We’ve decided to go ahead and appoint other individuals with different expertise and experience.” She refused to elaborate. I wonder why.
To be sure, the White House will be far happier with the new hand-picked members who tell the president exactly what he wants to hear. As the Washington Post reported:
The three new appointees are Benjamin Carson, the high-profile director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University; Diana Schaub, chairman of the department of political science at Loyola College in Maryland; and Peter Lawler, a professor of government at Berry College in Georgia. All are respected members of their fields. And their writings suggest their tenures will be less contentious than their predecessors’.
When not performing some of the most difficult surgeries in the world, Carson is a motivational speaker who often invokes religion and the Bible and has lamented that “we live in a nation where we can’t talk about God in public.”
Schaub has effusively praised Kass and his work. In a 2002 public forum discussing the council’s cloning report, she talked about research in which embryos are destroyed as “the evil of the willful destruction of innocent human life.”
In a book review in the conservative Weekly Standard in late 2002, Lawler warned that if the United States does not soon “become clear as a nation that abortion is wrong,” then women will eventually be compelled to abort genetically defective babies.
I’m left wondering why the White House even bothers to create these panels in the first place. If they exist to merely rubber stamp what the president is going to do anyway, why waste everyone’s time with a “council” of experts deliberating over a pre-determined decision?
If the remaining members of the Council on Bioethics have any pride in their scholarship, they will resign and save themselves the trouble of helping to write position papers that will be ignored anyway.