Romney's Stem Cell Runaround

Here I am in my home state of Massachusetts, explaining on occasion to out-of-blue-state friends that Governor Mitt Romney gets a bad rap. He ended the archaic blue laws here which forbade liquor sales on Sunday (yes, that was in Massachusetts), refused to eat cheesesteaks from Pennsylvania in a Super Bowl bet for health reasons and has actually held federal employees to account for their job performance, having the nerve -- nerve I say! -- to fire more than one supervisor who screwed up the Big Dig.

It seemed that Romney fit the Northeast Republican model to a T -- a social moderate who refused to let religion turn him into a Puritan. He fit the mold set by George Pataki, Rudolph Guiliani, John Rowland, Christie Todd Whitman and others who were palatable to educated urban young adults and older suburban Republicans. These governors and mayors certainly had their faults, but by and large wouldn't let their personal religious beliefs dictate how they should enforce the Constitution and protect individual liberties.

But yesterday, Romney did a flip-flop John Kerry would envy. He announced he now wants to ban a specific type (not all) of stem cell research on the grounds it is unethical and destroys human life. Further Kerry-fying the issue, he added he supports all other kinds of stem cell research.

The whole contretemps is actually quite confusing. Since running for office in 2002, Romney has pushed hard to make Massachusetts a biotech nirvana. Just last month he was on record saying he would help the State Legislature pass laws to promote research, just like California is doing. There is speculation that Romney has national ambitions and this is a lame attempt to curry favor in the far-more conservative national Republican party, which is against almost all stem cell research. The very fact that Romney announced this in The New York Times instead of The Boston Globe or Boston Herald favors this. In the color-blind partisan Washington world, the word "republican" and "Massachusetts" don't mix, despite the fact that Republicans have held the corner office here for 15 years.

Romney hasn't backtracked yet but said embryos for stem cell research created by cloning cross an ethical line. To watch Romney's stem cell ideas evolve see this site.

Like abortion, stem cell research has very serious moral and ethical issues. Nobody should arrive at a decision on either subject without careful considering the consequences. As you can guess, I'm a fan of individual freedom and choice and even if stem cell research only achieves half of its potential, we would be foolhardy not to exploit its benefits. And speaking for Massachusetts -- a state still recovering from the technology depression and with world-class biotechnology colleges and businesses -- investing in stem cell research should be a no-brainer. You are destroying a living embryo; once those two little cells meet, you've got life. But if what we learn from the research helps prolong life in sick people and finds a cure for a single disease, those embryos have not been destroyed in vain.

Governor Romney is a smart guy who, maybe to suck up to the partisan national GOP, had to backtrack on his official policy. Or maybe he had given real thought to the issue and reconsidered his position, and offered a half-assed compromise to try and please everyone. Either way, he comes across as either pandering to the right or backstabbing the biotech community he worked so hard to court. If he gets his way, the new sucking sound in Massachusetts will be the biotech community fleeing to California, Europe or wherever scientific and economic progress and dollars won't be hindered by a leader's personal beliefs.