Tom DeLay

Mr. DeLAY

Mr. DeLAY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Wicker).

Mr. DeLAY. Mr. Speaker, could I inquire of the gentlewoman from Colorado (Ms. DeGette) and the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Stupak) how many speakers they each have left? I have four, actually five, counting me.

Mr. DeLAY. With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Neugebauer). (Mr. NEUGEBAUER asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. DeLAY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King).

Mr. DeLAY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Ms. Foxx).

Mr. DeLAY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Burgess), who was an OB/GYN physician for 21 years and has delivered over 3,000 babies and understands that an embryo is a stage of development.

Mr. DeLAY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Akin).

Mr. DeLAY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Weldon), who has graduated with honors, is a physician in internal medicine, and also has degrees in biochemistry.

Mr. DeLAY. Mr. Speaker, how much time remains on all sides?

Mr. DeLAY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I just wanted to point out that it has been said that there are 100,000 embryos available for research. I guess they want to add another portion to their bill requiring parents to give their embryos up for research because at the present time there are only 2.8 percent of the parents that have allowed or have designated their embryos to be used for research. That means there are only 11,000 available for this research. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith).

Mr. DeLAY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Aderholt).

Mr. DeLAY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman from Pennsylvania (Ms. Hart).

Mr. DeLAY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Boustany), a heart surgeon, a graduate from LSU, and chief resident of thoracic and cardiovascular surgery at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York.

Mr. DeLAY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Renzi).

Mr. DeLAY. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. DeLAY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Garrett).

Mr. DeLAY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Barrett).

Mr. DeLAY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey), who is an OB/GYN physician, who practiced for 26 years and has delivered over 5,200 babies.

Mr. DeLAY. Mr. Speaker, could I inquire as to the time on all sides?

Mr. DeLAY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Kansas (Mr. Tiahrt). (Mr. TIAHRT asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. DeLAY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Speaker, what we have before us today is not a debate as some have suggested between science and ideology, but between aspirations and actions. Both sides of this debate wish to ease human suffering. So what divides us is not our ends, but the means to which we would resort to pursue those ends. That is why the Castle bill must be defeated, because while we are motivated by our aspirations, we are defined by our actions; and the Federal Government simply cannot sanction the actions authorized and funded by this legislation. For all the arguments we have heard today, scientific, ethical, political, the debate for and against the Castle bill, for and against the authorization of Federal taxpayer dollars to fund medical research predicated on the destruction of human embryos is in essence a question of the level of respect and dignity our government chooses to grant human life in its earliest stage. That embryos are human beings is not a political dispute. An embryo is a person, a distinct, internally directed, self-integrating human organism. An embryo has not merely the potential to become a human being. It is one, and as such, just like a newborn or a toddler or a teenager, possesses instead the internally directed potential to grow into adulthood, to become in a sense what he or she already is. An embryo is whole, just unfinished, just like the rest of us. We were all at one time embryos ourselves, and so was Abraham, so was Mohammed, so was Jesus of Nazareth and Shakespeare and Beethoven and Lincoln. And so were the 79 children, those snowflake children, those snowflake children ages 6 and under who have been adopted. Do not throw them away. Adopt them. These children have been adopted through different programs, but particularly the Snowflake Embryo Adoption Program, who under the Castle bill and its predictable progeny might otherwise have been destroyed in a petri dish, these children that were embryos. An embryo is nothing less than a human being, a fact both morally intuited and scientifically unquestioned. What level of respect and dignity, then, should our government grant such little creatures, these tiny beings who our eyes suggest are not like us but who our hearts and minds know in fact are us? The Castle bill is very clear, and though I oppose it, its clarity well serves both sides in this debate. The Castle bill says essentially that the potential medical and scientific progress represented by an embryo's stem cells justifies, justifies taxpayer funding for the destruction of that embryo through the harvesting of the stem cells. Of course, it is not the hoped-for end of the Castle bill that we oppose, nor necessarily, among some on this side of the aisle, even its destructive means, but instead the entitlement of those destructive means to Federal tax dollars. After all, human embryos are being harvested for medical research every day in this country. We just do not think the government should be forcing the American people to pay for it, especially considering the discouraging track record of the kind of research the Castle bill has in mind. To date, Mr. Speaker, none, none, not one of the countless and extraordinarily well-endowed private embryo-cell-harvesting projects has yielded a single treatment for a single disease. Not one. Embryonic stem cell therapies which are by design definitely untherapeutic to the embryos have in fact proven to be similarly harmful to those patients the treatments were supposed to help. Harvested embryonic stem cells are typically rejected by the host patient and often form cancerous tumors as a byproduct of that rejection. That is to say, Mr. Speaker, it does not work. And, indeed, many embryonic stem cell experts concede that such research will not yield results for decades, if at all, if ever. In truth, then, it is not the ends that would supposedly justify the grizzly means of the Castle bill, but the mere aspiration to those ends. On the other hand, better developed stem cells from the umbilical cords of newborn babies and the bone marrow of fully grown adults have led to treatments of no fewer than 67 separate diseases. Based on this successful track record, the biomedical industry is pouring its own money into adult stem cell research. It is the smart investment. In other words, Mr. Speaker, the Castle bill would throw taxpayer money at the same unsuccessful research that companies with the financial motivation for developing such research are avoiding. It just does not work. Indeed, one might say the stubborn advocacy of embryonic harvesting in the face of the overwhelming clinical evidence of its futility might be a genuine case of ideology trumping science. But what if it did work, Mr. Speaker? What if all the Utopian comments of the Castle bill's proponents were to come true? What then? What if we could be sure that government-funded destruction of human embryos could do all the things we are asked to believe? Well, in that case, Mr. Speaker, we would still be right to oppose it because in the life of men and nations, some mistakes you cannot undo. Some mistakes do not just come back and haunt you, they define you. A decision by our government to sanction embryo harvesting here at the very dawn of the biotechnology age could come to own us, for the paltry research sum envisioned by the Castle bill is but the first generation, the first drop of the deluge. Its offspring will ultimately include cloning, genetically engineered children, a black market of human body parts, and a global economy organized around the exploitation and hyper-ovulation of impoverished women and girls for their eggs. If the mere aspiration of ends justify the means here, in our first ethical challenge of the biotechnology age, how could we hope for a higher standard the next time? Which returns me to the irreducible question of this debate: What level of respect and dignity ought this government grant defenseless unburdensome human life at its earliest, most vulnerable stage? Given the biological fact of a human embryo's membership in the human family, given the technological necessity of embryonic destruction as a precondition of embryonic stem cell research, given the medical reality of embryonic stem cell research's consistent therapeutic failure, given the moral catastrophe of means-justifying-the-ends morality, and given the physical revulsion people instinctively feel when considering the destruction of defenseless human life by scientists in lab coats; given all these factors, the answer a proponent of taxpayer-funded embryonic stem cell harvesting and research must give is ``none.'' For if we afford the little embryos any shred of respect and dignity, we cannot in good faith use taxpayer dollars to destroy them. I wish there was another way, Mr. Speaker, but there is not. It is just wrong, not as a matter of ideology or even fate, but as a matter of respect and dignity. We are not asking anyone here to recognize the rights of human embryos, but the wrongs of human adults. This is not about the embryo's standing as a juridical person, but our standing as moral persons. Because the choice to protect a human embryo from federally funded destruction is not ultimately about the embryos, it is about us and our rejection of the treacherous notion that while all human lives are sacred, some are more sacred than others. I heard it said here today, Some are more sacred than others. Like our embryonic cousins, Mr. Speaker, our Nation is whole but unfinished. The issue is a test in which we are asked out of good and pure intentions just this once, just this tiny little bit, to let the ends justify the means, to let the noble aspirations justify ignoble actions. In this test, in this vote, then, we have an opportunity today to speak truth to the power of biotechnology, to rise up against the prevailing winds of human excess and hold fast to the dignity of human life upon which all other worldly truths are based: to ensure our appetite for knowledge is checked by our knowledge of our appetites; to stand up, as only America can, in the name of the least among us, whom we serve, and become the people we are. I ask my colleagues, seize the opportunity and vote ``no.''

Mr. DeLAY

Mr. DeLAY. Mr. Speaker, the issue of human cloning and embryonic stem cell research cuts to the very core of politics. And today the House will hear passionate arguments, essentially about the nature and value of human life. Now, that debate will be, among other things, controversial, because the proponents of embryo destruction in the name of progress believe it is not the embryo destruction its opponents oppose, but rather progress itself. But it is not so, and the bill before us now, the Stem Cell Therapeutic and Research Act proves it. This bill, which provides for Federal funding of research using adult stem cells which have, unlike embryonic stem cells, proven medical benefits in treating more than 60 separate diseases, will pass with the overwhelming support of both sides of this debate. Now, this bill, sponsored by the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith) will, for the first time, provide for taxpayer-funded research on well-developed stem cells from umbilical cords, expand Federal funding in bone marrow stem cell research, and provide for the development of a national stem cell therapy database for medical practitioners and researchers. This is what progress is, Mr. Speaker, concrete, definable and based on fact, rather than speculation or a false sense of hope. The best one can say about embryonic stem cell research is that it is a scientific exploration into the potential benefits of killing human beings. Proponents of medical research on destroyed human embryos would justify admittedly unfortunate means with the potential ends of medical breakthroughs down the line. But the deliberate destruction of unique, living self-integrated human persons is not some incidental tangent of embryonic stem cell research. It is the essence of the experiment. Kill some in hopes of saving others. The choice, however well intentioned, is predicated upon a utilitarian view of human life that this bill shows our government need not take. The Smith bill will fund the only kind of stem cell research that has ever proven medically beneficial, while helping to develop new and exciting avenues of inquiry, all without harming a single human embryo. This bill is progress, Mr. Speaker, and represents a perfect contrast to speculative and harmful methods of embryonic stem cell research. This is the right stem cell bill, Mr. Speaker. Progress, even progress that pushes the envelope of medical knowledge, need not be controversial. It need not divide us or force people of goodwill to devalue human life. Progress, in fact, is the opposite of such a choice. And the Smith bill unites the public and private sectors, both doctors and patients, and recognizes the inherent dignity and value of every human person.

Mr. DeLAY

Mr. DeLAY. We are working with your side on a unanimous-consent request to bring the bill up even without a rule. Hopefully, we can agree to a lengthy debate. This issue is so important for an up-and- down vote. Hopefully, we could have a full and open debate on this very important issue. And it will be hopefully done under a unanimous- consent request that will be worked out with your side, probably on Monday.

Mr. DeLAY. In working with the minority leader's office and your office, there have been requests to accommodate some Members and start this debate early in the afternoon instead of early in the morning. I would, along with the unanimous-consent request, anticipate us working out an agreeable time, and I would expect after discussions already being held that we would anticipate the debate to start on that bill somewhere early in the afternoon and running for the length of time agreed to by both sides.

Mr. DeLAY. If the gentleman will yield, I want to reemphasize, we are trying to work out with your side as lengthy a debate as necessary to have a full and important debate. Even though we would discourage any amendments to this very important issue, we would want to have opportunities for every Member to participate in the debate. So we would work out with your side enough time so that we can thoroughly debate this issue.