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[Tuesday] night, when Ron Reagan spoke, the person who introduced him was Representative Jim Langevin from Rhode Island. He is a pro-life Democrat. He's with us on all the issues except for the stem cell-issue. If you noticed his comments last night, he did say something—I'm paraphrasing—he did say, "I support protecting life on all levels." I was watching, and I thought there was a little pause for people to clap. Then people clapped because they were trying to figure out what he meant. But pro-life individuals know what he meant. He supports protecting life on all levels. However, he does support the one area where we disagree with him—human embryo stem cells.

What is your position on that?

We are opposed to using human embryos, because adult stem-cell research is making great strides, and we think we need to focus on that. What Ron Reagan was talking about last night was cloning. I don't believe that Rep. Langevin supports cloning. When Rep. Langevin was speaking, he didn't talk about human embryos, he was talking about stem cells. I think the adult stem cell research is where we should be focusing.

Is there a similar silence regarding stem cells as there is about abortion?

There does need to be more discussion on that too. I think people are really confused about what is involved here. When you hear—especially if you have somebody with Alzheimer's or you have somebody with Parkinson's—you can use these human embryos that are going to be discarded anyway to cure your father your mother, I think a lot of people could be persuaded that way. But when you talk to them about what this is, it's going down a slippery slope. If you start to do this, people are going to do what Ron Reagan was talking about last night, which is cloning. That's not the right direction.

What we really need to talk about is adult stem cells and the cord blood from umbilical cords. We need to focus on that kind of resource. Just think how many babies are born everyday, and the umbilical cord blood is discarded when it could be used for such good purposes. I just had a baby three months ago, and I was trying desperately for some place to donate, and there are not many options out there. I'm not a scientist, but I think it is an issue that we need to look into more, and have the people who know what they're doing come out and talk about it.

You were trying to get a link to your site from Democratic National Committee site. Have you had any success?

That was what we were trying to do when we first opened our office. We thought it was important that people started to hear about it, and we thought the best way was to have a link on the DNC website, because they had 187 links on their website, including to some organizations that we felt were more Republican than Democrat. So we tried for probably two years, and it ended when we had the meeting with Terry McAuliffe, in which we explained why it was important. Congressman Jim Oberstar from Minnesota explained why it was important to have a link to our website.

It's kind of curious though, two weeks later all links were removed from the website. They said that their thinking was the platform language was very pro-abortion so they couldn't use DNC resources to add a link to our website, but they said they would look into it and try to figure out some way. And then all links were removed, which is fine. It's kind of a draw.

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July (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48