Troubled Tommy Thompson
Tragically off message.

By Kathryn Jean Lopez, NR associate editor
March 8, 2001 12:55 p.m.

ife is full of little annoyances — like when Christine Todd Whitman reminded us — yet again — that she is pro-abortion on Crossfire last week. But, at the end of the day, who really cares what the EPA administrator thinks about abortion? More worrying is the case of Tommy Thompson.

Ever since he was named Health and Human Services Secretary, Thompson has addled the wits of pro-lifers, despite knee-jerk rhetoric from feminists warning that he would turn back the clock on women's abortion rights. So far, he's done exactly what the anti-abortion activists had feared: He's spoken his mind.

In the first weeks of his tenure, Secretary Thompson suggested that although he was personally in favor of embryonic stem-cell research, he knew his place and would make the president's position his department's policy. Just last week he told the Associated Press that he had in his short time in office already "learned the hard way" that as a Cabinet officer "you're working for the president and not for yourself."

But at a Senate Budget Committee hearing on Tuesday, the former Wisconsin governor said to Sen. Gordon Smith, "I am troubled, as you probably are, by the law. I know Congress is trying to change the law, but there is a law on the books that is troublesome" — referring to the federal ban on the federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research.

The law that Secretary Thompson is troubled by only bans federal funding — private money is still freely available to sponsor such research. Stem-cell research, as has been widely reported, is not stunted by the ban. The Secretary of Health and Human Services should know this.

Thompson's staff quickly recanted, saying that the secretary "meant to deliver precisely the opposite message." So, are we to believe he can't read his staffers' talking points on the most controversial issue under his stewardship? Whatever his problem, he had better clear it up, or the president ought to rethink his HHS choice.

If Tommy Thompson truly understood that he is serving at the pleasure of the president, he might take the time to ponder the administration's position on stem-cell research, which has always been perfectly clear.

President Bush, like Gordon Smith, who prompted the secretary's latest blunder, wants to help the living. Bush supports the federal funding of adult stem-cell research, which, as numerous published scientific reports have suggested, offers more promising treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's than the alternative--using cells obtained by killing human embryos.

If Secretary Thompson still thinks cells obtained from killing unborn children is the way to go, he ought to flip through Thursday's New York Times.

According to the most recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, using fetal cells to treat Parkinson's is a kind of medical shell game, with sometimes nightmarish results.

In a controlled study where cells from aborted fetuses were implanted into the brains of Parkinson's disease sufferers, "disastrous side effects" ensued. Doctors involved in the study report that while older patients showed no improvement, younger patients were left with freakish side effects. According to Dr. Paul E. Greene, a neurologist at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, "They chew constantly, their fingers go up and down, their wrists flex and distend." Patients "also writhe and twist, jerk their heads, fling their arms about," the New York Times reports.

The same medical and patients' groups who once claimed fetal tissue would cure all ills are now wringing their and saying embryonic stem cells will prove the magic bullet. Before Secretary Thompson believes their hype, he ought to talk to the human guinea pigs for fetal tissue-research.