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Monday July 24, 2006
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Germany Drops Opposition to EU Embryo Research Funding
By Hilary White
BRUSSELS, July 24, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – An EU concession has prompted Germany and Slovenia to drop objections to a proposal to fund embryonic stem cell research.
The EU has allotted €37bn to an omnibus science budget that included allowing funding for destructive research on living human embryos. Germany has been heading a shrinking coalition of countries opposed to the funding.
The German objections were dropped today after the European Commimssion assured the country that no EU money would be spent on projects in which human embryos would be destroyed. Without Germany's opposition the funding proposal will go ahead as planned, but with stricter regulations. The new rules, in addition to forbidding research which directly results in the destruction of embryos, also forbids the use of the funds for the purpose of human cloning.
Other European countries who had opposed the proposal included Poland, Austria, Slovakia, Luxembourg, Malta, Lithuania and Ireland.
Poland, Austria, Malta, Slovakia and Lithuania voted against the revised proposal, for "ethical and moral" reasons, according to USA Today. The revised rules still allow for some human embryonic stem cell research, in what news reports have quoted EU ministers ambiguously calling "subsequent steps."
Slovenian minister Dusan Lesjak, however, said that today's compromise, struck during a last-minute meeting in the hope of finding a workable compromise, “takes into account the legal situation in every member state. It enables the enforcement of high ethical standards.”
Germany, in most other ways regarded as the most liberal of states on most social issues, retains strong opposition to bioengineering. While German law has erased prohibitions on homosexual activity, contraception and divorce, and has established government-supervised brothels, there is still broad public opposition to any practice that in any way recalls the Nazi eugenics experiments. Germans of all political persuasions are widely opposed to scientific research that tends to manipulate or exploit human life.
Austrian minister Elisabeth Gehrer, speaking against the initial EU proposal, said “Do we really want 300-400 fertilised human embryos to be destroyed to create stem cells? This destruction of human embryos to create stem cell lines is not something we can support. We do not want community money, which includes Austrian money, to support this.”
After US President George Bush last week vetoed a bill that would have funded embryo research, German science minister Annette Schavan said, “We have got to do something that will conserve broad support for human life from its conception. The EU science programme should not be used to offer financial incentives to kill embryos.”
The late German President, Johannes Rau, summed up German opposition to genetic experimentation, euthanasia and the current revival of the eugenics philosophies in a speech in 2001: “Eugenics, euthanasia and selection - these are terms that, in Germany, are bound up with bad memories.”
“It does not take a believing Christian,” Rau said, “to understand that new forms of genetic manipulation and control would run contrary to the conditions of human freedom and human dignity.”
See related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Germany Hopes to Block Deadly Human Embryo Experimentation in the EU
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2006/jul/06072101.html
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