Four UCLA professors (including yours truly) were asked to do short comments on California Proposition 71, which set up funding of stem cell research, including programs here at UCLA. The UCLA magazine's website has published those opinions and has a reader poll where you can vote for the position most closely representing your own view. Here's my take:
"A key problem with this debate it that you have attractive and sympathetic spokespeople like [stem cell activist and UCLA grad student Candace] Coffee, whose stories play on our emotions. But who speaks for the unborn child? We only get one side of the story. The Catholic Church, of course, claims to speak for the fetus: ‘All human beings, from their mothers’ womb, belong to God who searches them and knows them, who forms them and knits them together with his own hands, who gazes on them when they are tiny shapeless embryos and already sees in them the adults of tomorrow whose days are numbered and whose vocation is even now written in the “book of life”’ (compare Psalms 139:1, 13-16) - Evangelium Vitae, 61.
“If you believe that human life begins at conception, as I do, creating human lives for the purpose of destroying them is an intrinsically evil act (as California’s Catholic bishops have made clear). Even if you believe human life begins sometime later than conception, however, you should still oppose Proposition 71. Stem cell research advocate Francis Fukuyama blasted Proposition 71 as ‘a huge, self-dealing giveaway of money from cash-strapped California taxpayers to a small group of institutions and companies that will remain largely unaccountable.’ California’s taxes are already among the highest in the country. Why then should California taxpayers who are opposed to the intentional destruction of human embryos in the name of scientific research be forced to subsidize venture capitalists, biotech companies and research institutions that already receive vast state and federal handouts?”
Also on the stem cell issue, my UCLA law colleagues Russell Korobkin and Stephen Munzer have just posted to SSRN a very detailed monograph on the law of stem cells, discussing "issues concerning the regulation of research, patent protection for stem cell innovations, informed consent of research subjects, and property rights in human tissue."
