Stem Cells Research

"By caring for children who need mentors, and for addicted men and women who need treatment, we are building a more welcoming society - a culture that values every life. And in this work we must not overlook the weakest among us. I ask you to protect infants at the very hour of their birth and end the practice of partial-birth abortion. [Applause. ] And because no human life should be started or ended as the object of an experiment, I ask you to set a high standard for humanity, and pass a law against all human cloning." [Applause. ]

(Bush 2003)

The day after the President's address to Congress and the nation, the US Senate took up the issue of human cloning. However, this was not the first time the US Congress had tried to pass a public law affecting human reproductive and therapeutic cloning. In 2001, the House of Representatives in the United States Congress passed by a more than 100-vote margin HR 2505, a bill to ban both therapeutic and reproductive cloning. Yet the US Senate could not agree on how to bring two competing bills to the floor for a vote, thus making it impossible to pass a bill during the 2002 session. Meanwhile, several states, including Michigan, California, Louisiana, Missouri, Rhode Island, and Virginia, passed laws to ban cloning of human beings. With the exception of Missouri, these state laws provide for fines of up to $10 million for violating the law.

Compared to other nations in this comparative study, in many respects the policy-designing process in the United States is not unique. However, whereas the actors may be similar to those in other countries, the institutions of government that operate within legislative, executive, and judicial arenas must be understood within the context of a compound republic of federalism. In the US, power is shared across levels of government and the powers of different branches of government are separated; this aspect of the policy design process goes a long way toward explaining ART policy-designing behavior in the USA. In the ART policy domain, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, policy-designing behavior was characterized by both pluralistic and ideological bargaining . Pluralistic bargaining consists of multiple, disparate groups with cross-cutting membership and shifting alliances trying to reach a compromise or accommodation.

In contrast, ideological bargaining is characterized by polarized coalitions of groups who are interested in neither compromise nor pleasing all groups. Pluralistic bargaining leading to accommodation best describes the AI, IVF, and surrogacy policy-designing process, whereas ideological bargaining that is based on attempts at persuasion is typical of the fetal tissue research, stem cell research, and human cloning policy-designing process. Certain aspects of the external environment, for example public opinion and defining events, may also be determinant. In the next section, we report on the few authoritative decisions - the policy design - affecting ART that the federal executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government made during the twenty-eight years between the monumental 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and the end of 2002. These authoritative decisions were coded for content using the instrument designed by the CPDP team of scholars. The following section summarizes the results of this systematic coding.