US anti-abortionists pressure cancer charity

There was a new development in the ongoing debate over whether the US government should fund human embryonic stem cell research. Under pressure from the Catholic Church, the American Cancer Society (ACS) has withdrawn from a coalition that is lobbying Congress to allow federal funding of such research.

The ACS, which receives over $500m a year in donations, earlier this month asked the Patients' Coalition for Urgent Research (Patients' CURe) to remove its name from a list of 31 research and patient advocacy groups that make up the coalition. The ACS had not only received pressure from officials in the Catholic church but had experienced a protest and revoking of promised donations at a fund-raising event. According to a spokesman, the chief executive of ACS agreed to meet a high-up official in the Catholic community after which the ACS decided it wanted to keep a 'lower public profile while it re-examined its position on the research'. Daniel Perry, a spokesman for Patients' CURe said that other members of the 4-month old coalition have been under pressure to withdraw support but have resisted. But, 'We're all getting hate mail', he added.

The controversy began last November when when a study reported the successful isolation of stem cells taken from a human embryo. Although the work is still being conducted in the private sector, there is a congressional ban on federal funding for research in which human embryos are destroyed. The ruling by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) suggested that the ban would not apply for stem cell research if the derivation was conducted in the private sector and used spare embryos donated by patients of fertility clinics. This has resulted in a heated campaign to maintain the ban by the hugely powerful anti-abortion lobby in the US. But patient-advocacy groups support the work which could lead to tissue therapies for a number of diseases including Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and juvenile diabetes.

The water in this debate appears to be more muddied than in usual anti-abortion campaigns. Last week, a senior Republican Senator and a Catholic Republican Congressman held a press conference with Patients' CURe to publicly support their pro-funding campaign. It appears that Senator Thurmond (South Carolina) has a daughter suffering from juvenile diabetes and Brian Bilbay (California) - who describes himself as pro-choice - said that 'as legislators we must also understand we have a huge responsibility not to get in the way of the miracles of modern science.'

The stem cell research debate is expected to take place during consideration of the annual spending bill for the DHHS.