Diana DeGette is a sixth-term Democratic congresswoman from Colorado’s first district, and the Democrats’ chief deputy whip in the House. Ever since her arrival in Congress, replacing the retiring Pat Schroeder in 1997, DeGette has focused her attention on abortion, reproductive issues, and — most prominently — the stem-cell debate. She is one of the chief sponsors of a bill to use tax dollars to encourage the ongoing destruction of human embryos for research. The measure, which would overturn President Bush’s stem-cell-funding policy, had the distinction of being the first bill vetoed by Bush and the only bill he has vetoed twice (in 2006, and in 2007).
In her new book,
Sex, Science and Stem Cells, DeGette seeks to relate the harrowing drama of her defense of abortion rights and advocacy of stem-cell research, and especially to describe, as she sees it, the great Republican assault on science in America.
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As biography, the book is an interesting and at times even moving read. DeGette’s wonderfully American family story and her unusual rise through Colorado politics make for a good yarn, and her recollections of her daughter’s first diagnosis of juvenile diabetes offer both a loving picture of her family and an insight into the intense tenacity of her stem-cell advocacy. But these personal stories are quickly dispensed with in the book’s first few chapters, and with them go all of its strengths and its charms. When she turns to substance, DeGette unleashes a dizzying mix of rank propaganda, factual inaccuracies, scientific distortions, personal venom, and embarrassing confusion. More importantly, she reveals an attitude that must leave us worried about the ability of the Democratic majority in Congress to govern on issues that touch upon science.
For anyone familiar with the subjects DeGette takes up, her gross and repeated factual misstatements must surely be the most peculiar feature of this most peculiar book. In areas in which she has been deeply involved for years, DeGette seems unaware of basic facts. She provides an almost comically erroneous description of the so-called “Dickey-Wicker Amendment,” which governs federal funding of embryo research. She wrongly asserts that research on stem cells from aborted fetuses is not funded by federal dollars. She believes federal funds had supported embryo research before 2001 — when in fact President Bush’s policy provided funding for the first time, under ethical constraints. She speaks of “the 110 million Americans suffering from diseases who stood to gain from potential applications” of stem-cell science — asserting, it seems, that every third American is dying of a terrible illness. She imagines, too, that “there’s a general public consensus about the ethics of embryonic-stem-cell research in this country.”
DeGette seems entirely unaware that she has voted to provide funds to encourage the practice of embryo adoption for the last six years — a program sponsored by Senator Arlen Specter, her close ally in the stem-cell fight. And she asserts, in one of the book’s numerous instances of shameless, audacious, arm-waving boasting, that when President Bush vetoed her funding bill for the second time, in 2007, he was almost ashamed to do it, and “there was no veto ceremony, no East Room spectacle, no press conference.” Actually,
there was precisely an East Room “spectacle,” and no shame to be found.
But DeGette’s most egregious factual errors are on matters of science, not policy and politics. In some cases, she spouts ludicrous talking points as scientific facts, arguing for instance, that the word “abortifacient” was made up by pro-lifers and is not a
medical term. But on questions of stem cells and human cloning, she is either systematically deceptive or appallingly ignorant.
“What most people don’t know,” she writes, “is that there are generally two types of cloning under discussion among bioethicists, lobbyists, activists, and legislators, as mentioned earlier: reproductive cloning and so-called therapeutic cloning, also known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), which involves the replication of cells for research purposes only.” In fact, at no point does any kind of human cloning involve the mere “replication of cells.” Cloning always involves the creation of a new human embryo that is genetically identical to another human being. The difference between the two types of cloning she describes has to do not with the procedure involved, but with what is done with the embryo produced by cloning: it is either transferred to a woman to develop to birth (reproductive cloning), or it is destroyed for research (so-called therapeutic cloning or SCNT). But DeGette repeatedly masks this fact with erroneous descriptions of cloning. “With SCNT,” she writes, “cells are taken from the body, and the nuclei are replaced. The cells are thus capable of being made into stem cells, which can in turn be programmed to become any type of cell in the body.” Again, no. Cells are not “turned into stem cells.” An embryo is created by cloning and then destroyed, and stem cells are removed from its inner mass.
After repeated examples of this kind of error, the reader is left wondering if DeGette is trying to fool us or is herself simply ignorant of these basic facts. Her related forays into ethical reasoning tend rather to support the latter view. “Reproductive cloning is a whole other issue,” she writes after incorrectly describing therapeutic cloning.
This is the process of replicating a human being for no scientific or therapeutic purpose whatsoever. It’s replication for the sake of replication — and the dangerous implications of this type of research are immediately and everywhere apparent. It promotes the troubling view that human beings can be designed or manufactured to demonstrate certain characteristics; it blurs the line between nature and science; it ignores the need for genetic diversity in the general population; it opens a dangerous door on the buying and selling of human life; it’s unsafe, unproven, unnecessary.
Of course each of these arguments applies also to therapeutic cloning, and in most cases even more emphatically. If she is troubled by these kinds of concerns, the career she describes in the book becomes very difficult to understand.
