COPLEY NEWS SERVICE
WASHINGTON – Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, R-Mo., who has repeatedly authored bills that would ban abortion, once told a wheelchair-using young man she could never support the stem cell research that he believed might one day help him walk.
But then her close friends had a baby with muscular dystrophy, her husband developed cancer and died, and her mother-in-law succumbed to dementia. The day after her mother-in-law's death in May, Emerson stood on the House floor and asked: "Do they not have as much right to life as that embryo that is going to be tossed away?"
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Longtime abortion foe Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader from Tennessee, referenced his ethical responsibilities as a transplant surgeon when he announced this summer that he would break with Bush and support the House bill. "I am a physician," Frist told his colleagues. "My profession is healing. I have devoted my life to attending to the needs of the sick and suffering. . . . In all forms of stem cell research, I see . . . great promise to heal." Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, who has opposed abortion for all of his 21 years in Congress, said his support for stem cell research is based partly on family tragedies: His father died of complications from diabetes at 71, his brother died of liver cancer at 44, and his first granddaughter died in the womb because of a crimped umbilical cord. Other prominent, anti-abortion Republicans who supported the House bill included Bakersfield Rep. Bill Thomas, who is chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, and Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch.
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