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Bill Frist, Christian, physician, pro-lifer, esteemed Majority Leader of the Senate, and (we are told) presidential hopeful, has stepped out of the greatest of our debating chambers to make a second fateful speech on embryo stem cell research—this time, courtesy of Franklin Graham, at the Cove. Far from repenting of his sudden decision to break with President Bush and support the federally funded killing of "spare" embryos, Frist has chosen to use this august occasion to re-state it. He does so in measured terms, full of conscience and a desire to do the right thing. And while he still gets the stem-cell policy wrong, he underlines other issues that we neglect at our peril.

Of course, if Frist is conflicted on stem-cell policy, he is not alone. It would be much simpler if this nation were divided down the middle between women and men of conscience, who value the dignity of every human life from its very beginnings, and heartless killers, for whom profit jostles with carelessness every time they make a moral choice. Life is more complex.

Conscientious people are torn, they are divided, they may think one thing one day and another thing the next. Many wish they could have it both ways. They believe that we have to protect the embryo. And they want so much to fight disease that they are prepared to believe the hyped hope of Nancy Reagan and Ron Reagan, Jr., with their siren calls for "cures" that trump the claims of tiny embryos.

Bill Frist is also conflicted, and he speaks on both sides of the same debate. He is pro-life. He believes you should never "create a life … take a life, to save a life." Yet he has fallen under the spell of the "cures" argument. He is willing to make an exception: You should never take a life to save a life, unless "those embryos will—with 100 percent certainty—be otherwise discarded and destroyed."

Of course, such certainty is impossible. Who knows what would have happened to embryo A if scientist B did not have federal funding? Frist is quite willing to "take a life, to save a life," though he says otherwise. It's obvious enough that people who will die anyway should not be killed, let alone killed for our research benefit!

But Frist raises three other issues. First, he does not give the President full credit for his very distinctive position. He says that he differs from the President only in this way: "The President limits the number of cell lines to a specific date—August 9, 2001. I would limit the number of cell lines by a fully transparent, ethical decision-making process rather than a specific cutoff date." This makes the Bush position look arbitrary, while the Frist position seems "ethical" and "transparent."

In fact, the ethics of the Bush position is very different from that of Dr. Frist. The point about the "cutoff date" is that it was the date the President gave his famous televised speech to the American people. He said, in effect, I will not encourage anyone to kill one more embryo; all I will do is let you experiment on cell-lines cultured from the corpses of those "for whom the life and death decision has already been made." This is an ethical ocean away from the idea that we will only kill a few who are going to die anyway. His disagreement with the president's position is from an ethical point of view much bigger than he implies

But, on the other hand, Dr. Frist is completely out of step with the mainstream arguments being used by scientists—including Nobel laureates—who want to get on with embryonic stem-cell research on their own terms. They don't want a few more embryos. They want, quite literally, billons. They want fresh, choice, specially created, cloned embryos. They want "therapeutic cloning," the idea that has gripped the public imagination and is driving the push to overturn the Bush policy on stem-cell funding.

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October (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49