Friends:

We share with you a commitment to the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of every member of the human family. It is for this reason that we oppose abortion, embryo-destructive research, euthanasia, and every other form of direct killing of innocent human beings. We believe that these practices are grave injustices that no society should promote, facilitate, or even permit.

Despite Barack Obama’s record of support for legal abortion and its public funding, and his pledge to lift President Bush’s limitations on the federal funding of embryo-destructive research, you felt that Obama would, all things considered, make a better president than John McCain, and you encouraged your fellow pro-life citizens to join you in voting for him. Some of you argued that Senator Obama, despite his vocal support for legal abortion and equally vocal opposition to pro-life legislative initiatives, was actually the superior candidate from the pro-life point of view. His economic and social policies, many of you said, would strike at the causes of abortion and reduce its incidence. You predicted that lives would be saved.

When it came to embryo-destructive research, many Obama supporters argued that there was no difference between their candidate’s position and the position of Senator McCain. Both, unfortunately, proposed to lift President Bush’s restrictions on federal funding of this lethal research. So that issue was a “wash.”

We have always feared that your hopes and expectations would prove to be unfounded. We have never found it plausible to think that Obama’s policies will reduce the number of abortions. Indeed, we suspect that the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, to mention just one of pro-life laws Obama pledged to eliminate, will (as the abortion lobby itself has predicted) increase the number of abortions in the United States, perhaps by as many as 300,000 per year. But the jury is still out on that one, so let’s lay it aside for the moment.

On March 9, however, the verdict came in on the issue of embryo-destructive research, and the news is very bad. It would have been bad enough had Obama done what McCain likely would have done, that is, incentivize embryo destruction by authorizing the federal funding of research that involves destroying so-called “spare” embryos left in assisted reproduction clinics. But Obama’s executive order goes farther. It instructs the Director of the National Institutes of Health to promote and fund all forms of embryonic stem cell research that are not banned by law. In other words, Obama has removed all impediments to the funding of research in which human beings are created (whether by cloning or other procedures) specifically for the purpose of being destroyed to produce stem cells. True, under the Dickey-Wicker amendment, the actual embryo killing must be done with private funds. But once the embryos are destroyed, federal taxpayer money will now freely flow to pay for research using cell lines derived from those embryos. President Obama has incentivized the creation of embryos in unlimited numbers for research in which they are killed. Moreover, he has revoked the 2007 executive order instructing the Director of the National Institutes of Health to promote and fund research aimed at developing non-embryo-destructive sources of pluripotent stem cells. This was a baldly ideological move that can have no point other than to appease the embryo-research lobby at the expense of lives and possibly scientific advancement.

Make no mistake about it: scientists who do not share our pro-life convictions will have strong scientific incentives to use somatic cell nuclear transfer (cloning) or other procedures to “custom-make” embryos with precisely the genetic and other qualities they want. As everyone in the field knows, the frozen IVF “spare” embryos are not nearly as useful as embryos that are custom-made. Should therapeutic uses for pluripotent stem cells be found, human embryos produced by cloning will have an obvious and overwhelming advantage over IVF “spares”: matching the patient’s genetic sequence precisely, they will avoid immunorejection.

Recently Professor Douglas Kmiec told an interviewer that President Obama opposes human cloning. This is not true. By his own account, the President opposes only “reproductive cloning.” This misleading term is used to mask his support for the creation of human embryos by somatic cell nuclear transfer for purposes of research in which they are destroyed-what is no less misleadingly called “therapeutic cloning.” The truth is that under the Obama policy human cloning-somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) to create embryonic human beings-will be legally permitted and funded by the federal government. The restriction the President has supported is a ban on the implantation of cloned human embryos once the cloning has already occurred and the new human embryo has been created. It is, in effect, the mandatory destruction of embryonic humans. We respectfully ask Professor Kmiec to correct the record on this profoundly important issue.

Even if one supposes that Barack Obama’s policies will result in fewer abortions despite relaxed legal restrictions, the number of human lives saved-even on the most optimistic reading-will be offset by the lives taken as a result of what President Obama did. This misguided and profoundly unjust policy alone wipes out any case for regarding Barack Obama’s election as a boon to the cause of defending nascent human life. And if Senator Obama’s campaign promises to the abortion lobby are to be believed, this may be only the beginning.

We know how deeply disappointed truly pro-life Obama supporters must be by the radicalism of the President’s decision. Democrats for Life (DFL), to its credit, has forcefully condemned the decision, making no secret of feeling betrayed by a president that it had gone the extra mile to work with in an effort to find “common ground.” A few days after the decision was announced, prominent Obama supporter Dr. David Gushee, a distinguished Evangelical theologian, publicly rebuked the President for “a series of disappointingly typical Democratic abortion-related moves.” We hope that you, too, will speak out against what can only be described as a moral atrocity against the weakest and most vulnerable of our brothers and sisters. On this, pro-lifers like you who supported Obama can find common ground with pro-lifers like us who found his denial of the full and equal dignity of unborn members of the human family to be disqualifying. Let us speak out with one voice against this grave and shocking injustice.

Best regards,

Robert P. George, Princeton University
Hadley Arkes, Amherst College
Francis Beckwith, Baylor University
Gerard V. Bradley, University of Notre Dame
Robert Lowry Clinton, Southern Illinois University
Teresa Collett, University of St. Thomas School of Law
Anthony Esolen, Providence College
Matthew Franck, Radford University
John Breen, Loyola University of Chicago
Patrick Lee, Franciscan University of Steubenville
Michael New, University of Alabama
Michael Paulsen, University of St. Thomas
Peter Ryan, S.J., Mount Saint Mary’s University
Ronald Rychlak, University of Mississippi
Michael Scaperlanda, University of Oklahoma College of Law
Colleen Sheehan, Villanova University
Gregory Sisk, University of St. Thomas School of Law
James Stoner, Louisiana State University
Christopher Tollefsen, University of South Carolina
Micah Watson, Union University
John Wauck, Pontifical University of the Holy Cross