Public Policy: Cell Division.

President bush opposes federal funding for research on stem cells taken from human embryos because the research would destroy the embryos. He is under intense pressure to reverse his position. The media are almost as gung-ho for this cause as for campaign-finance reform. And some politicians who usually vote with pro-lifers-notably Sens. Orrin Hatch, Strom Thurmond, Gordon Smith, and John McCain, and former senator Connie Mack-have also urged Bush to fund the research.

Advocates brandish polls suggesting that most Americans, even most pro- lifers, support this funding. These polls are meaningless. Since most people have not spent much time thinking about the issue, poll results vary greatly depending on the wording of the questions. (Opponents of the research have found that most people are with them when the questions mention that the research destroys human embryos.) For the same reason, most people are unlikely to vote based on the issue.

We do not know which decision would be better for Bush politically. What we can evaluate are the moral arguments that supporters of the research have used to get pro-lifers to surrender their objections. These arguments plainly fail.

Some such supporters have advanced the curious notion that a human embryo that has not been implanted in a womb cannot be a human person; so it is acceptable to destroy that embryo. To consider implantation a criterion for personhood is to make a fetish of location. If we had the technology to develop an embryo all the way to infancy, toddlerdom, and beyond, without ever being implanted, would anyone deny that these older human beings had a right to life?

Some libertarians, meanwhile, have become attached to the idea that opposition to embryonic stem-cell research is ridiculous because early embryos are human only in the same sense that every human cell is human. An embryo contains the genetic code for a human being, goes the argument, but so do the skin cells we lose in the shower. They, too, are "potential human beings" because emerging cloning technology will make it possible to develop them into human beings.

Pro-lifers, though, do not believe that human embryos have the potential to develop into human beings; we believe they are human beings. They are whole human bodies. They are not functionally part of other human beings. Skin cells are. If a clone were created using the genetic material from a skin cell (joined with an ovum from which genetic material has been extracted), it would be the act of cloning that created a new human being, just as conception normally does. The clone would be equivalent to the embryo, but the skin cell before cloning is equivalent to neither.

Finally, supporters of the research argue that many of the embryos that would be destroyed in it are slated for destruction or deep freeze anyway. They will, in the charming phrase of advocates, "remain unused." That we destroy small human beings-discarding "excess embryos" from in vitro fertilization, or for that matter aborting "unwanted children"-is a scandal that should be ended and, we hope, one day will be.

Freezing embryos is less problematic, as it leaves open the possibility of allowing these human beings to reach their full potential at some point in the future. In the interim, embryos slated for destruction should no more be used for research than Death Row inmates.

Embryonic stem-cell research may not lead to the medical miracles now being discussed. Similar speculation a decade ago, when pro-lifers were being asked to abandon opposition to fetal-tissue research, proved tragically wrong. But even if embryonic stem-cell research were to lead to everything claimed for it-were to cure cancer and heart disease to boot-we would oppose it. Bush should support research that does not destroy embryos, such as research using stem cells taken from adults. But he should refuse federal funding for embryo-destroying research, and indeed push for an overall ban on it.