Missouri Right to Life Misleads Pro-Lifers
Commentary by Rep. Bob Onder, M.D.,
J.D.
for the St. Louis MetroVoice
Quiz:
1.
In 2007 the Missouri General Assembly approved a higher education bill, S.B.
389 (“MOHELA bill”) to fund scholarships and capital projects in Missouri
college campuses. How much money from
this bill has gone to human embryonic stem cell research (ESCR) or human
cloning?
a.
$350 million
b.
$ 5 million
c.
$100
d.
Not a single cent.
2.
For the 2007 – 2008 budget year, H.B. 7 appropriated $13 million for
agricultural research, and in the fall of 2007 the Life Sciences Research Board
awarded grants to some of the research projects that applied for funding. How many of these projects involved human ESCR
or human cloning?
a.
20
b.
10
c. 5
d.
Zero
3.
At present, how many researchers in Missouri are using Missouri taxpayer money
to do human ESCR or human cloning?
a.
1,000
b. 100
c. 10
d.
Zero
4.
Since the passage of Amendment 2 (“Human Cloning Amendment”) in November 2006,
how much Missouri taxpayer money has gone to human ESCR or human cloning?
a.
$100 million
b.
$100,000
c.
$100
d.
Not a single cent.
If you answered “d” to all four questions, you are correct, and you
are very close to understanding the disagreement between the overwhelming
majority of pro-life legislators and Missouri Right to Life (MRL) on the issue
of its controversial rating and endorsement process.
In June 2007 William Neaves, CEO of the pro-cloning organization The
Stowers Institute for Medical Research, told the Kansas
City Business Journal that it was putting on hold 
plans
for a new 600,000-square-foot facility because of the “political climate”
in Missouri. A big part of this “political climate” was the
election of nine new Republican State Representatives, including this author,
all of whom were adamantly anti-ESCR and anti-cloning. In addition, the great majority of senior Republican
legislators, including Representative
What
was the reaction of Missouri Right to Life?
Declare victory? Praise the
dedication of the legislators who stood against Stowers and its millions of
dollars? No, MRL instead “rated” a
number of votes having nothing to do with ESCR or cloning, and classified numerous
solidly pro-life Republicans as “mixed,” i.e., not fully pro-life. Many pro-life Representatives and Senators
were denied MRL’s endorsement, including the author of this article. In fact, I carried H.B. 1831, the major
pro-life bill this session to strengthen Missouri’s informed consent statutes
and make it a crime to coerce a woman to have an abortion. This bill was a major MRL priority this year
and has been featured in every MRL newsletter (although without mentioning the
name of the sponsor). I fought for the
bill in Policy Development Committee, on the Health Care Policy Committee, and
on the floor of the Missouri House. Pro-abortion
forces such as Planned Parenthood’s newsletter, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the Columbia
Daily Tribune and the Kansas City
Star editorialized against my bill.
In the end it passed the House 113 to 33, but the Senate refused to take
it up, in part because of frustration dealing with MRL.
Dwight
Widaman wrote in a recent article for the Kansas
City Metro Voice, “The serious errors under which MRL is currently
operating are recognized by more than 100 pro-life legislators in the Missouri
House and Senate, many other pro-life and pro-family groups both in Missouri
and nationwide, as well as former board members of MRL.” I would only add to Mr. Widaman’s statement
that some current MRL board members have contacted me stating that they see
serious errors in MRL’s endorsement and rating system as well.
What
is the basis of MRL’s controversial rating system in which far left
pro-abortion Senators such as Sen. Joan Bray and Sen. Jolie Justus have better “scorecard”
ratings than pro-life stalwarts like Sen. Delbert Scott, Sen. Rob Mayer, and
Sen. Scott T. Rupp?
In
an August 12th email blast sent out by MRL State President Pam Fichter she
alerted pro-lifers to an article that is to appear in the September issue of
the St. Louis MetroVoice as a rebuttal
to a commentary entitled Who’s Pro-Life
and Who’s Not? that was published in the August issue of the MetroVoice. In MRL’s rebuttal MRL General Counsel Jim
Cole states the guiding principle: “It does not matter whether an unborn child
is created by cloning or by conception, his or her life is equally sacred
either way. The corollary: MRL will not
count a vote to fund cloning and killing embryos as any less anti-life than a
vote to fund abortion.” I agree with
this statement and the corollary, and I suspect that almost every Republican
legislator that MRL rated as “mixed” would agree as well. The question then is, ‘did Missouri legislators vote to “fund cloning and killing [human]
embryos” in 2007 and 2008’?
The unequivocal position of this author,
of anti-cloning leader and appropriations chairman Representative
What do Mr. Cole and MRL cite in their
assertion that pro-life Missouri legislators voted to fund ESCR and
cloning? They cite two types of
legislation: 1) S.B. 389, which transferred money from the Missouri Higher
Education Loan Authority to fund ‘scholarships
and capital projects’ on Missouri college campuses (“MOHELA bill”) and 2)
two budget bills, H.B. 7 and H.B. 2007, which in addition to being necessary to
keep Missouri government functioning, provided money to fund the Life Science
Research Board (LSRB). In 2007 money was
appropriated to LSRB for “plant and animal life sciences,” as well as biofuels
and odor reduction research, essentially ‘agricultural
research’. In 2008 the appropriation
was broadened to include medical device research, biomaterials, and computer
technology research, (none of which relate to live tissue of any type) as well
as agricultural research. As mentioned
in the quiz above, the 2007 appropriation has already been distributed to the
researchers who successfully applied for grants, and not a penny has gone to
human ESCR or human cloning. At present
the LSRB is considering 171 research project applications. (The list is
available to the public.) Not a single
application is for ESCR or cloning research.
So
what is the problem? According to Mr.
Cole, pro-life legislators passed “legislation purporting to contain pro-life
restrictions that ignored Amendment 2.”
This is not accurate. What we did
was to do our constitutional duty to pass a budget that appropriates money to
very specific projects. Mr. Cole and MRL
worry that when the Legislature allocates money to agricultural research,
somehow Amendment 2 magically transforms that appropriation into money for ESCR
and human cloning. Likewise when the
Legislature allocates some MOHELA assets to long-needed construction projects,
such as libraries, lecture halls, and gymnasiums, on Missouri college campuses,
somehow Amendment 2 magically transforms that appropriation into money for ESCR
and human cloning. Therefore, by voting
for agricultural research and libraries, pro-life legislators are voting for
ESCR and human cloning, and we are no longer deemed pro-life by MRL.
This
reasoning is contorted and reflects a profound ignorance of the budget
process. When the Legislature allocates
money to agricultural research, it is not enacting a “restriction that is
unconstitutional under Amendment 2,” any more than when the Legislature
appropriates money to MoDOT for roads or to DESE for schools. If pro-life legislators cannot appropriate
money to agricultural research without concern that the money will go to human cloning, how can we appropriate money for roads
without the same concern? MRL’s logic,
taken to its logical conclusion, would require that the General Assembly pass
no budget at all.
The
disagreement between pro-life legislators and MRL amounts to this: MRL accuses
us of voting for bills that fund human ESCR and human cloning, and it rates
those votes “anti-life” and denies us endorsements accordingly. Pro-life Republicans point out that MRL is
rating ‘votes that have nothing to do
with life issues at all’, and we
view MRL’s ratings as irrational and some of its officers’ statements as defamatory.
Another
point should be made about the Missouri Technology Corporation and the Life
Science Research Board. Governor Matt
Blunt, while himself pro-ESCR, appointed two well-known Amendment 2 opponents,
State Representative Dr. Wayne Cooper and myself, to these respective boards to
help reassure the pro-life community that money appropriated would not be used
for human ESCR and cloning. In fact, my
appointment was filibustered in the Missouri Senate for several hours by
pro-cloning, pro-abortion Democrats. It
seems that the pro-cloners know who their enemies are, but MRL does not know
who its friends are.
Mr.
Cole makes a final point that seems extraneous to the issue of MRL ratings and
endorsements, but rather takes a final “pot shot” at Missouri House
Republicans. Mr. Cole writes, that
legislators “allowed pro-life resolutions to be bottled up in committee” and
faults pro-life legislators for not signing a “discharge petition.” Mr. Cole appears to be referring to
Representative Jim Lembke’s HJR 11, a constitutional amendment to ban human
cloning, which 46 other representatives and I co-sponsored. While I initially signed the “discharge
petition,” I was never enthusiastic about this approach. I did address MRL’s Lobby Day on the issue of
cloning, I never “loudly proclaimed” support for the discharge petition as Mr.
Cole contends. HJR 11 was “bottled up in
committee” because the vote on the resolution was tied in the House Health Care
Policy Committee, chaired by pro-life Rep. Wayne Cooper. One way of getting the bill out of committee
was a discharge petition. Another was to
wait until one of the pro-cloners missed a committee meeting and then call for
a vote. I
favored the latter approach, and the latter was exactly what happened. So as often happens in the legislative
process, while Representative Lembke and I differed on strategy, we did not
allow it to divide us or our commitment to the pro-life cause. In the end we worked together and
successfully advanced the pro-life cause on bioethics issues in Missouri’s post
Amendment 2 political culture.
Mr.
Cole also errs when he states, “If the Legislature had approved a resolution
and a ballot summary, the Secretary of State would never have been involved and
Missourians would be voting on fixing Amendment 2 in November.” HJR 11 did not contain a ballot summary (See
2007 bills at www.house.mo.gov.) The
Secretary of State, who wrote very biased language in the cases of Amendment 2
and the amendment filed by Cures Without Cloning, would have been responsible
for writing the ballot language (“ballot title”) for HJR 11.
Finally,
Mr. Cole raises an alarm that human cloning is closer to reality, given that a
team of scientists recently announced having cloned a human embryo and that the
embryo lived to the blastocyst stage. (No stem cell lines were created,
however.) While the report was published
in a reputable journal and appears to be true, what Mr. Cole did not mention is
that more and more scientists are realizing, as I argued when I fought
Amendment 2 in 2006, that cloning is impractical and unnecessary. Last summer, two teams of scientists, one
American and one Japanese, simultaneously reported that by transferring certain
genes into human skin cells, they could create stem cell lines more or less
identical to ESCs. Since cloning and
human eggs were not involved and no embryo was created, no human life was
created or destroyed by this new method.
This led Dr. Ian Wilmut, the cloning scientist who cloned Dolly the
Sheep, to announce that he was abandoning cloning in favor of this new
approach. While we must continue to
vigorously oppose human ESCR and human cloning, and to oppose funding for the
same, the science is rapidly rendering cloning obsolete.
So
what happened to those nine freshman Republican legislators who were part of
the anti-cloning “political climate” so feared by Stowers and the cloners? All of us received the rating “mixed,” i.e.,
not fully pro-life. None of us was
endorsed by MRL. Further, the President
of MRL, Pam Fichter, went so far as to record defamatory “attack” phone calls,
paid for by political opponents, aimed at defeating another Missouri House
pro-life leader, Representative Jane Cunningham, and me in recent primary
elections. (Recordings of these calls
are available.) Mrs. Fichter also
admitted to me that she spoke to a consultant for the opponents of Rep.
Cunningham and myself, who told her that “MRL will go from the outhouse to the
powerhouse” if it played a role in influencing Republican primaries this
August. Could this desire for “power” be
behind the recent MRL ratings and endorsements?
A
dismayed friend recently confided in me that he feared that no political
organization, not Planned Parenthood or NARAL or the ACLU, has done more to
damage the pro-life movement in Missouri the last two years than MRL. Indeed, if MRL ratings and endorsements are
based, not on votes on pro-life issues but on ignorance of the budget process,
much damage will be inflicted on the pro-life movement in this state. I call on MRL to remedy this significant
problem as soon as possible. In the
meantime, pro-life Missourians will need to look elsewhere for guidance on “Who’s
Pro-Life and Who’s Not.”
Representative
Bob Onder is a Missouri State Representative, medical doctor, licensed attorney,
husband, and father of six. He is a
former board member of Missouri Right to Life. In 2006 as President and Chairman of the Board
of Missourians Against Human Cloning, he led the statewide effort against
Amendment 2. He has authored numerous
articles and bills on life issues. He
was recently a candidate in the Republican primary for US Congress in Missouri’s
9th Congressional District. He was endorsed by Concerned Women for America,
Eagle Forum, Missourians United for Life, and Congressional pro-life leaders.
This commentary first appeared in the September 2008 issue of the St. Louis
MetroVoice.
