The Truth Behind the NJ Stem "$ell" Agenda by NJRTL Executive Director, Marie Tasy

Please note: The bills mentioned in this op-ed passed the NJ Senate in 2005. Similar versions with different bill numbers were reintroduced in January of 2006 and both passed the NJ Senate a second time.  Bill S1471/A2828 (formerly S2649/A4188) was signed into law on December 19, 2006. Under this law, the state of NJ would borrow $270M in bonds to fund the construction of three Stem Cell Institutes authorized to perform clone and kill research. Bill S1091/A1891(formerly S2913) passed the Senate on June 30, 2006 and is waiting action in the Assembly. Bill S1091/A1891(formerly S2913) is a ballot referendum asking NJ voters to approve $230M in bonds for the unethical research.  Contact your Assembly members and urge them to vote No on Bill S1091/A1891. Please visit our Legislative Action Center for more information on the status of these bills or to send a pre-written message to your Assembly members. Click the "Legislative Action" tab at the top of the page. Click here to read about NJ's Clone and Kill Law
Please contact us at 908 276-6620 to find out how your State Senator voted.

The Truth Behind the NJ Stem "Sell" Agenda

Home News Tribune Online 12/6/05

MARIE TASY

Acting Gov. Richard J. Codey has announced his intention to push for a vote in the Legislature sometime this December or early January on S-2913, a bill that would allow a question to be placed on the ballot asking N.J. voters to approve the borrowing of hundreds of millions of dollars in public bonds to fund unethical research. If approved by both houses of the Legislature, the referendum will be placed on the November 2006 ballot. Action is also expected in the Assembly on S-2649/A-4188, which passed the state Senate by a razor-thin margin of one vote last June. This bill proposes spending $150 million in bonds to build an Institute in New Brunswick where this unethical research will be conducted. Both bills were stalled this past year because the Assembly, fearful of voter backlash, refused to take them up in an election year.

It would be a breach of the public trust for the Legislature to approve these bills because sponsors have been deceptive about their true intent and nature of the so-called "stem cell" push in New Jersey. If the Legislature unwisely chooses to approve Codey's bills, especially the ballot initiative, it is important for state voters to understand what type of "research" public money will be spent on to advance. It is unconscionable that certain facts continue to be withheld from the public and no attempts have been made to remedy this situation. What the 2004 NJ Stem Cell law sponsored by Codey and Assemblyman Neil Cohen, D-Union, actually did is allow researchers to clone and kill human beings in our state. Any funding proposal that voters will be asked to approve under the guise of "stem-cell research" will include this type of immoral experimentation on humans.

The Stem Cell Law is fraught with contradictions — i.e., purporting to do one thing but then authorizing the exact opposite. The public has only heard that New Jersey passed a law enabling embryos left over from IVF treatments to be used in experimental research, but the truth of the matter is that this law went much, much further. In addition to allowing research, which will kill existing human embryos left over from IVF treatments, this law made it the public policy of New Jersey for researchers to create new human embryos derived through "somatic cell nuclear transplantation," the very same cloning technique used to clone Dolly the Sheep. With regard to embryonic stem-cell research, it's quite telling that private investors are not investing in it because they recognize that no cures are occurring through this type of research. Conversely, 65 diseases have been treated or cured through the use of adult or non-embryonic stem cell research.

It's important to note, however, that the 2004 N.J. law does not limit the research to humans in the embryonic stage. Although the law purports to ban fetal trafficking, it allows "reasonable payment for the removal, processing, disposal, preservation, quality control, storage, transplantation, or implantation of embryonic or cadaveric fetal tissue." One of the many questions sponsors refuse to answer is, if this law was supposed to authorize embryonic stem-cell research, why does it also contain language authorizing trafficking in fetal tissue? Since the only way to obtain fetal tissue is to implant an embryo into a womb and gestate it to a later stage of development, it is clear that the intention was to allow researchers to grow the human embryo well beyond the embryonic stage.

In another classic example of contradicting language, the law makes it a crime to clone a human being, but it defines cloning as "cultivating a cell with genetic material through the egg, embryo, fetal and newborn stages into a new human individual." According to experts in the field of law and bio-ethics whose objections were submitted in writing to legislative committees only to have them ignored, the language in the bill means the crime of cloning would not take place before the child was "through" — that is past or beyond or done with — the newborn stage. It also means that the child in question would have to be aborted in order to avoid the crime of cloning. To sum it up, N.J. law now allows researchers to create a human embryo through cloning, implant the human embryo into a woman's (or artificial) womb, harvest the cloned human embryo to develop to the fetal and even newborn stage, and then use this human child for research where he or she could be killed for their spare parts, organs, and tissues. Codey's bills will fund this grisly research.

It is no secret that New Jersey is already facing $28.9 billion in debt, several billion dollars of which is from a bond deal former Gov. James E. McGreevey used to balance his last state budget and for ongoing expenses of the state. N.J. taxpayers should be outraged that the same lawmakers who rammed through this clone-and-kill law in a lame duck session two years ago without sufficient public notice or debate have now announced their intention in the upcoming lame duck session this December to jam more legislation through that will borrow millions of dollars for this morally objectionable research. Add to the mix the fact that the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, an institution currently under FBI investigation for charges of fiscal mismanagement, making illegal political contributions and awarding of no-bid contracts to companies with political ties, is scheduled to receive the lion's share of Codey's bill to spend $150 million in bonds to construct a research center in New Brunswick, to be jointly operated by Rutgers and UMDNJ.

Our state government and its citizens should have no part in funding or procuring these unspeakable assaults against humanity. The biotech lobby and their cohorts who stand to personally and professionally benefit from this funding scheme have already launched a shameful and misleading public relations campaign of manufacturing baseless statistics and making scores of empty promises about miracle cures and economic benefits to try to garner public support for their slice of the pie. Codey is planning to schedule these bills for a vote this December or early January despite the fact that New Jersey is already facing $28.9 billion in debt. Lawmakers who vote for either of these proposals should be held accountable for their actions. N.J. citizens should not "buy into"his morally and fiscally bankrupt stem "sell" scheme.

Marie Tasy is executive director of New Jersey Right to Life, Cranford.