Congratulations to representative Dana Rohrabacher, 56, and his wife Rhonda, 34, who gave birth to triplets last month. As we tend to suspect when a couple has triplets, the new parents used the services of a fertility clinic. Modern in-vitro techniques generally involve creating multiple embryos in the laboratory, transferring two or three and hoping that at least one will make it through to birth. Often it doesn’t work. Sometimes it works unexpectedly well. Successful or not, the process creates many more embryos than babies. There is a built-in presumption — really, an intention — that even most of the transferred embryos will die. As for embryos that aren’t transferred, they get destroyed or frozen indefinitely — unless, that is, they are used for stem-cell research.
So it’s interesting that Rohrabacher has changed his position on the medical use of embryonic stem cells. The California Republican was a supporter of President Bush’s three-year-old policy severely restricting government-funded stem-cell research. But he signed a recent letter to Bush from 206 members of Congress urging the President to reconsider that policy. Bush says he won’t reconsider.
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“Embryonic stem-cell studies are controversial because they involve the destruction of human embryos,” the New York Times explained in a May 6 article reporting on the shifting politics of stem-cell research.
