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KEVIN ECKSTROM
Conservative Christian groups won a major victory Monday (Aug. 23) when a Washington judge halted federal funding of embryonic stem cell research to allow a suit challenging the practice as illegal to go forward.
The suit, by a group of doctors and Nightlight Christian Adoptions, says federal funding of embryonic stem cells limits the number of fertilized embryos the agency can make available to couples seeking to "adopt" them from fertility clinics.
The suit also says the practice violates a 1996 law prohibiting federal funding for research in which embryos are "destroyed, discarded or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death."
President Obama lifted restrictions on federal funding in March 2009, and the National Institutes of Health issued ethical guidelines for the research four months later.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, who had initially dismissed the suit, said the research and the NIH guidelines clearly violate the 1996 law.
Embryonic stem cell research (ESC) "is clearly research in which an embryo is destroyed," Lamberth wrote. "To conduct ESC research, ESCs must be derived from an embryo. The process of deriving ESCs from an embryo results in the destruction of the embryo."
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