The Smell of Victory

Another miraculous cure for adult cells. Embryonic stem cells?

A man paralyzed after a knife attack is walking (assisted) again after a transplant using cells in his nose.

Within three months, the treatment was reaping rewards. Fidyka — paralyzed from the chest down — regained feeling in his lower extremities; his left leg developed muscle mass; and bladder, bowel and sexual functions even returned, the BBC reports. Most importantly, he can now walk once again with the assistance of a frame. Researchers published their results Tuesday in the journal Cell Transplantation. ....
Professor Geoffrey Raisman, whose team at University College London performed the technique, hopes to similarly treat three more people in Poland over the next few years if funding for medical trials can be obtained. He told the Guardian:
“We believe that this procedure is the breakthrough which, as it is further developed, will result in a historic change in the currently hopeless outlook for people disabled by spinal cord injury.”

These Are The Days of Miracles & Wonders

The full story is behind a paywall unfortunately, but this is wonderful.

Curtsy: ninme's twitter, RT-ing @thetimes

Aha! Alternate source.

Stay Of Execution

Injunction against government funding of embryonic stem cell research. Judge Royce Lamberth is an intersting fellow. Takes the law very seriously and absolutely hates Presidential power. Always takes the side of Congress. In this instance, his argument is very strong, will be interesting to see if it holds. Government to appeal. 

Me Like Dick Van Dyke

He's become a spokesman for adult stem cell therapies. See his ad here, it's good.

NASA Litella: Nevermind

Robert Gibbs says all that NASA Muslim outreach stuff was just a misstatement.

"That was not his task and that's not the task of NASA," Gibbs said. 

So his interview with Al Jazeera and speech in Cairo were just flukes. Ah.

Say, while we're on the topic of misuse of Science, a bunch of scientists are complaining about being pressured by the Administration to hide or alter conclusions for political purposes. Jonathan Adler comments.

Instacurtsy. I enjoyed his headline for scientists believing Obama: More rubes self-identify.

Meanwhile, another triumph for bad, politicized science of the Bush-era variety from which we're now liberated: adult stem cells restore sight to 75% of folks blinded by chemical burns.

Once Was Blind

Russell Turnbull once was blind:

[He] lost most of the vision in his right eye when he had ammonia sprayed into it as he tried to break up a fight on a late night bus journey home.
The attack, which badly burned and scarred his cornea, left him with permanent blurred sight and pain whenever he blinked. 

But now he sees:

his sight has been almost fully restored thanks to a new technique where doctors regrow the outside membrane of his cornea from stem cells taken from his healthy eye.

Chalk up another amazing cure to adult stem cells.

Curtsy: Brutally Honest

A Desperate Attempt To Get Readers

From The Ryskind Sketchbook

The Formerly Gray Lady endorsed cloning today and called for federal funding of it. Only they were careful to call it "somatic cell nuclear transfer" so we wouldn't understand. Anything for new readers I guess.

The editorial endorses President Obama's "no one should ever tell a scientist what he can't do" policy. The same philosophy that brought us Mengele (who fittingly ended his days as an abortionist in Argentina), Tuskegee and the like.

Even WaPo sees the problem with that, although it draws the bright line of ethics in a far different place than human dignity demands.

The funding ban Mr. Obama just lifted was on stem cell sources derived from freshly killed embryos. Thanks to the Dickey-Wicker amendment, however, the government still may not directly destroy an embryo, nor create one for purposes of research. That's what this morning's editorial is about.

There's no slippery slope we're always told, and yet only a week after Obama allowed the government to buy dead baby cells, we're already moving on to the next atrocity.

First the Times insisted the government become a market for destroyed embryos, insisting that backwards evangelicals like the President were keeping sick people from cures.

Then the funding ban lifted and the Times suddenly admitted ESCR won't cure; it's totally unnecessary; and it was being fully funded all the time.

Today they say we haven't gone far enough. Nothing will be right with the world until U.S. taxpayers are directly creating human embryos solely to experiment upon them. It'll be fine: an ethics panel will guide us.

Right. Like that 1975 biomedical ethics panel at Health Education & Welfare that signed off on federal experimentation on live babies --infants who'd been aborted but lived. Or the 1979 experiments on low-income black and hispanic fetuses slated for abortion no matter what degree of harm or pain they might cause.

You can always trust an ethics panel.

Update: P.J. O'Rourke slams the President's moral reasoning or lack thereof, saying a high school debate team could do better. He begins by listing some things science has "known" over the years.

The periodic table consists of Earth, Wind, and Fire and a recording of "Got To Get You into My Life."

The world is flat with signs saying "Here Be Democrats" near the edges.

You can turn lead into gold without first selling your Citibank stock at a huge loss.

We're the center of the universe and the Sun revolves around us

Not to mention:

T]he negro would appear to stand on a lower evolutionary plane than the white man, and to be more closely related to the highest anthropoids.

Mentally the negro is inferior to the white.

[A]fter puberty sexual matters take the first place in the negro's life and thought.

The above are quoted--not out of context--from the article titled "Negro" written by Dr. Walter Francis Willcox, chief statistician of the U.S. Census Bureau and professor of social science and statistics at Cornell.

But by all means, let's let the scientists tell us what should be.

A Mere Eight Years For The Truth To Come Out

An astonishing admission from the Formerly Gray Lady, who has discovered that federal funding is actually going to undermine ESCR funding, because private and state funding sources are drying up.

A number of states and philanthropies rushed in to fill the gap after President George W. Bush imposed the restrictions in 2001.

So it was amply funded all along and the ban didn't stop anyone from doing anything? Yup.

And ESCR isn't that promising after all? Yup.

Just as Bush & the pro-lifers told you to guffaws for 8 years? Yup.

P.S. New adult stem cell breakthrough: now they can use your own cells to cure congestive heart failure.

Most Translucent Presidency Ever

"Opposite presidency" continues:

I don't like the idea of spending more money, nor am I interested in expanding government's role.

Pete Wehner has a list of 6 major items in which Obama does the opposite of what he says. I'd add:

• Keeping politics out of science.

• Creating a Council On Women & Girls that's actually a council on stealing the innocence of girls.

• Transparency that's actually translucency. (You can't even find things on the White House website for the love of pete)

Krauthammer Hands Obama His Hat

And Krauthammer supports ESCR! He makes the important point that Obama --while pointedly saying he draws the line at cloning, which he would never, never support-- in fact permitted cloning.

While I favor moving that moral line to additionally permit the use of spare fertility clinic embryos, President Obama replaced it with no line at all. He pointedly left open the creation of cloned -- and noncloned sperm-and-egg-derived -- human embryos solely for the purpose of dismemberment and use for parts.

Opposite presidency!

I suggested the bright line prohibiting the deliberate creation of human embryos solely for the instrumental purpose of research -- a clear violation of the categorical imperative not to make a human life (even if only a potential human life) a means rather than an end.

On this, Obama has nothing to say. He leaves it entirely to the scientists. This is more than moral abdication. It is acquiescence to the mystique of "science" and its inherent moral benevolence. How anyone as sophisticated as Obama can believe this within living memory of Mengele and Tuskegee and the fake (and coercive) South Korean stem cell research is hard to fathom.

More:

The other part -- the ostentatious issuance of a memorandum on "restoring scientific integrity to government decision-making" -- would have made me walk out.

Restoring? The implication, of course, is that while Obama is guided solely by science, Bush was driven by dogma, ideology and politics.

What an outrage. Bush's nationally televised stem cell speech was the most morally serious address on medical ethics ever given by an American president. It was so scrupulous in presenting the best case for both his view and the contrary view that until the last few minutes, the listener had no idea where Bush would come out.

Obama's address was morally unserious in the extreme. It was populated, as his didactic discourses always are, with a forest of straw men. Such as his admonition that we must resist the "false choice between sound science and moral values." Yet, exactly 2 minutes and 12 seconds later he went on to declare that he would never open the door to the "use of cloning for human reproduction."

Does he not think that a cloned human would be of extraordinary scientific interest? And yet he banned it.

Is he so obtuse as not to see that he had just made a choice of ethics over science? Yet, unlike Bush, who painstakingly explained the balance of ethical and scientific goods he was trying to achieve, Obama did not even pretend to make the case why some practices are morally permissible and others not.

This is not just intellectual laziness. It is the moral arrogance of a man who continuously dismisses his critics as ideological while he is guided exclusively by pragmatism (in economics, social policy, foreign policy) and science in medical ethics.

Well, that's the difference between Bush & his critics on absolutely every issue. Bush is a morally serious person --which is not to say he never got anything wrong, just that he weighed the true import of what he did before making a decision. I see nothing of the sort in anyone in this administration or its fawning admirers.

Liberal Science On Parade

Jill Stanek is wondering if Bill Clinton thinks an embryo is merely an egg, and if he'd oppose embryonic stem cell research if he found out an embryo has already been fertilized.

I am going to extend to him the benefit of the doubt: that he simply had a brain freeze and repeatedly said "fertilized" when he meant "implanted." Because everyone knows that an "embryo" is called such from the moment of fertilization until the 8th week of life, after which we use the term "fetus." It is fertilization that makes the embryo an embryo.

But...my polite interpretation makes other things he says make less sense. And either way it's still shockingly ignorant: embryonic stem cells are not the best hope we have of cures. The scientists who want to study ESCR are interested in studying the progress of disease; they want embryos in which to watch a disease unfold, not for therapies at this point. Even the Formerly Gray Lady knows that.

In private, however, many researchers have projected much more modest goals for embryonic stem cells. Their chief interest is to derive embryonic stem cell lines from patients with specific diseases, and by tracking the cells in the test tube to develop basic knowledge about how the disease develops.

If that were not the case, everyone would be well satisfied with cell re-programming, which is perfect for the kind of research that involves using direct cell regeneration to heal.

For researchers, reprogramming an adult cell can be much more convenient, and there have never been any restrictions on working with adult stem cells.

So all this talk about not wanting to do human experiments or clone...that's nonsense when the action being defended is ESCR. The cures President Clinton is describing have already begun to be here through adult stem cells.

Curtsy: CMR

Formerly Gray Lady Notices "Science" Doesn't Like ESCR

Minus the snarky anti-Bush remarks, this is an amazingly good piece. Rethink stem cells? Science already has. In which it is acknowledged that ESCR is unnecessary.

However, the president’s support of embryonic stem cell research comes at a time when many advances have been made with other sorts of stem cells. The Japanese biologist Shinya Yamanaka found in 2007 that adult cells could be reprogrammed to an embryonic state with surprising ease. This technology “may eventually eclipse the embryonic stem cell lines for therapeutic as well as diagnostics applications,” Dr. Kriegstein said. For researchers, reprogramming an adult cell can be much more convenient, and there have never been any restrictions on working with adult stem cells.

And way oversold:

Members of Congress and advocates for fighting diseases have long spoken of human embryonic stem cell research as if it were a sure avenue to quick cures for intractable afflictions. Scientists have not publicly objected to such high-flown hopes, which have helped fuel new sources of grant money like the $3 billion initiative in California for stem cell research.

In private, however, many researchers have projected much more modest goals for embryonic stem cells. Their chief interest is to derive embryonic stem cell lines from patients with specific diseases, and by tracking the cells in the test tube to develop basic knowledge about how the disease develops.

Not to mention extremely dangerous to patients:

Despite an F.D.A.-approved safety test of embryonic stem cells in spinal cord injury that the Geron Corporation began in January, many scientists believe that putting stem-cell-derived tissues into patients lies a long way off. Embryonic stem cells have their drawbacks. They cause tumors, and the adult cells derived from them may be rejected by the patient’s immune system.

They don't mention the fact that adult stem cells currently treat 65 ailments, but you can't have everything. This is today's journalism: admit the truth only after the opposite policy has been effected.

How cruel and cynical this is though. Did you see that poor fellow in the wheelchair who lobbies for ESCR each year and was singing Obama's praises because now he's convinced he'll walk again? I truly hope he will, but anyone who really wanted him to do so would put him on to this treatment. Or this one, instead of holding his recovery hostage to an abortion industry trying to legitimate itself.

Robbie George On The Opposite Presidency

Robbie George & Eric Cohen point out the President's abuse of language yesterday.

The announcement was classic Obama: advancing radical policies while seeming calm and moderate, and preaching the gospel of civility while accusing those who disagree with the policies of being "divisive" and even "politicizing science."

"We respect religious people and human rights activists," he assures us. We just demonize them as uncivil, that's all.

This claim of taking science out of politics is false and misguided on two counts.

First, the Obama policy is itself blatantly political. It is red meat to his Bush-hating base, yet pays no more than lip service to recent scientific breakthroughs that make possible the production of cells that are biologically equivalent to embryonic stem cells without the need to create or kill human embryos. Inexplicably -- apart from political motivations -- Mr. Obama revoked not only the Bush restrictions on embryo destructive research funding, but also the 2007 executive order that encourages the National Institutes of Health to explore non-embryo-destructive sources of stem cells.

Second and more fundamentally, the claim about taking politics out of science is in the deepest sense antidemocratic. The question of whether to destroy human embryos for research purposes is not fundamentally a scientific question; it is a moral and civic question about the proper uses, ambitions and limits of science. It is a question about how we will treat members of the human family at the very dawn of life; about our willingness to seek alternative paths to medical progress that respect human dignity.

Abuse of language is abuse of power and the threats to basic human and civil rights are coming fast and furious now. (Here's what I mean by Opposite Presidency.)

It's Opposite Presidency!

Remember "opposite day" when you were a kid? It's back. For four years. For example, today the President signed an executive order permitting federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.

I don't know what's been more nauseating: the fact that he took this step in spite of its being utterly unnecessary to destroy embryos --as reported in WaPo a mere week ago today.

Or the fact that none of the press happens to mention the fact that Obama rescinded TWO Bush EOs today: the second one promoting alternative stem cell research. That's right kids, Obama --in the name of science, mind you-- just de-funded the kind of research that has been restoring feeling and movement to spinal cord injury patients since 2004. Plus growing new bladders, treating brain cancer, growing new livers, giving a total reprieve from Parkinson's for 4 years.... (Find links to bunches o' cures here.)

And the press dutifully reports this nakedly political, backwards, troglodyte, ignorant and downright evil move as "progress."

And it's called:

REMOVING BARRIERS TO RESPONSIBLE SCIENTIFIC
RESEARCH INVOLVING HUMAN STEM CELLS

Bah. Up goes the chocolate ration once again.

It's opposite presidency!

Weekend Reads

"Law Review" from The Ryskind Sketchbook

Why This Election Is About The Freedom of Religion. Fr. Neuhaus agreeing with me about things getting ugly for the Church. Although he expresses it rationally and not in Yours Truly's state of panic. For those who like that sort of thing.

In re that same topic, check out Bishop Vasa's letter to his flock, by way of WDTPRS. "Cowards like me..." he writes. Relevant to ninme's comment in this post, too. Times are never so bad that men cannot be saints in them....

Anthony Esolen on what it means to be someone's keeper.

what does that mean, to be a keeper? When Cain shot back at the Lord God that first teenage question, "Am I my brother's keeper?", he had of course just murdered him. He desired the alienation that his question implies. In his snideness Cain reduces the relationship of brother to brother to that of brother to keeper. Sheep are kept; children are minded; men are not. That at least seems to be Cain's unspoken assumption. Now the Lord does not reply that Cain is his brother's "keeper." He ignores the reply entirely. He tells Cain that his brother's blood cries out to him from the ground. He never wanted Cain to be his brother's keeper. He wanted him to be his brother's brother. A brother is a great deal more than a keeper -- and also a much different thing, too. The keeper and the kept have, in that one regard, no mutual relationship. Indeed, the keeper can only keep by reducing the kept to a ward (which means, literally, someone who is kept care of, guarded), or to a sheep. If I am to be my brother's brother, I mind what may harm him, yet I also expect from him the acts of a brother: I am my brother's brother.

Esolen has an excellent series on Joe the Plumber, too, er... plumbing the depths of his interview with some infobabe. See One, Two, Three. Read 'em all.

Why do I sometimes forget about Esolen and let his essays mount up on me? Don't miss Babies & Bottle Caps, either.

At every opportunity, Mr. Obama has voted against laws requiring that doctors and nurses do what is reasonable to save such a baby's life, or even, as our eminent Robert George has put it in his recent article for the Witherspoon Institute, to wrap it in a towel, so that it will be warm as it dies. He has said that he voted against such a law in Illinois because the law was unnecessary; that was a flat lie, as Professor George shows. What Hillary Clinton found in her heart to do -- or could not find in her conscience not to do -- Mr. Obama rejected.
Is that "one issue"? He believes that unwanted babies, in these cases, should be left alone to die, and that has no bearing, none, on what the man is within, and what he believes about human life generally?
[snip] What, then, does he believe is not subject to political manipulation? What is to be valued in its own right, not for utility?

The Irony Is Heartbreaking. Just read it.

Silver Linings, two of 'em. Declining economy means declining enrollment at Ivy League schools (fewer Marxists!) And fewer Little Princess bedrooms with Belgian linen.

Still a Center-Right nation. Peter Wehner expands on his WaPo theme.

I'm sure there's a schadenfreude-y word for when you are happy to find it's not all your fault. London & Frankfurt more at fault for the credit crunch than we are. Yay! Everyone's stupid and corrupt! D'Oh!

Heard about this when I was too busy to read up. Sarkozy: Obama's views on Iran "utterly immature," "formulations empty of all content." I thought The One would make things right with Europe?

Calabresi: Redistributing the Constitution.

Bill Roggio on that strike into Syria. Very interesting story.

When Does Human Life Begin? A Scientific Perspective. Just in case anyone actually wants to know! (Shall we keep this on hand for the next election cycle?) I'm emailing it to all the Catholic members of Congress.

The World We Think In & The Drama Of Existence. Fr. Schall, not content with writing his own books at the pace of one a month, reviews other people's as well. Why do I have such affection for a man who torments me by writing faster than I can read? David Walsh was a professor of mine, but I never knew what After Ideology was about until just now. Even though we read it in seminar.

Krauthammer: The reckoning comes in the morning.

Charlotte Allen: From Little ACORNS Big Scandals Grow

ACORN has a contract with Project Vote to conduct voter-registration drives using ACORN employees, who initially claimed to have signed up 1.3 million new voters at a cost of $16 million, then lowered that figure to around 450,000 (according to an October 23 New York Times story) after eliminating fraudulent registrations, duplicates, and incomplete forms. The internal report, by Washington lawyer Elizabeth Kingsley, pointed out that until very recently, Project Vote's executive director, Zach Pollett, was also ACORN's political director.

So the voters were 70% fraudulent? Sheesh.

Hey! The Presidency & The Congress aren't the only important battlegrounds Tuesday. There are the social issues in the various states. E.g.:

• CA's Prop 8 banning same-sex marriage. A sure loser at the top of the summer, w/ Hollywood money & testimonials pouring in to defeat it, now in a dead-heat.
• MI's Proposal 2 to overturn the state ban on embryonic stem cell research. Dead heat.
  
• SD's Measure 11 to ban abortion except in cases of rape, incest or threat to the life of the mother. Also in dead heat tonight.
• Not in dead heat: likely to pass is Washington's Right to Die measure. As Creative Minority Report notes, what is it with the Northwest and death wishes?
• Plus, Ward Connerly's ACRI has ballot initatives to clean government of race-based preferences in Nebraska & Colorado. Leads in CO at 53%. NE's amendment 424 also polling well. I read 63% somewhere, but can't find that number now.

What Is With The Washington Times?

This is the front page of WaTi this morning. See the blaring headline & photo: Not-So-Warm welcome? The actual story is way at the back of the "A" section, where you find out there was a protest against American beef, which is actually an anti-SoKo government protest, and a huge, privately-organized pro-Bush rally.

These are SoKo Christians gathered for a prayer meeting to greet Bush.
Read more about it here, from a liveblogger.

Curtsy: Gateway Pundit.

Then yesterday the Times ran this pernicious story: McCain, Obama agree on big issues.

On some policy issues, the presidential election just won't matter - both Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain are prepared to overturn President Bush's policy and expand federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, one of a series of contentious issues pushed out of the presidential debate because those at the top of the tickets agree.

Both men have voted repeatedly against Mr. Bush's stem cell policy, which severely restricts funding to the lines that existed in 2001, and have said on the campaign trail they would expand federal funding if given the chance.

This is true insofar as it goes. But the clear intent of the story is to suggest to social issues voters that there's no real difference between McCain & Obama on the life questions, when Obama is the most radically pro-abortion candidate who has ever run for high office and McCain is 100% pro-life except on this one issue, where science is about to render the matter moot, all signs are the candidate is re-thinking the matter, and even so, McCain's position differs from Obama's. McCain is (currently) willing to allow the use of existing frozen embryos for research, but not to permit creation of new embryos for that purpose, whereas Obama is for federally funded embryonic stem cell research and an anything goes policy. The story does get around to mentioning that eventually. In the last 'graf, which in the print version is on a different page which most readers won't get to.

And there was this.

I feel a budget cut coming on.

The Veto

Bush's remarks on why he vetoed the Surrender bill. He used a special pen, too --one provided by the father of a fallen soldier for the purpose. Maybe it's just the lighting, but the President's head is dramatically whiter than just a few months ago, seems to me. Especially noticeable in the video (available at the link).

I don't know if anyone listens to Bush anymore, but here are CNN reporters saying a pull-out would be very, very bad. Think Michael Ware is a right-wing shill? Here he agrees with another reporter that it would be a disaster:

WARE: Well, even more than that, I mean, if you just want to look at it in terms of purely American national interest, if U.S. troops leave now, you're giving Iraq to Iran, a member of President Bush's axis of evil, and al Qaeda. That's who will own it.
And so, coming back now, I'm struck by the nature of the debate on Capitol Hill, how delusional it is. Whether you are for this war or against it, whether you've supported the way it's been executed or not, it does not matter. You broke it, you've got to fix it now. You can't leave, or it's going to come and blow back on America.

And The New Republic says Congress is Iraq illiterate (subs. required/Curtsy: Instapundit).

Sen. Casey Votes Right On Stem Cells

Much to his home paper's distress.

Mr. Casey's and Mr. Bush's opposition to embryonic stem-cell research and the position they have taken is apparently faith-based. It is difficult to see, however, how faith-based compassion does not include supporting a critical quest for medical solutions to severe, fatal diseases....We had hoped better of him.

I'd thought worse of him and am pleasantly surprised. Just for the record, where have Bush or Casey argued they were against funding embryonic stem cell because of their faith? And where is the evidence that embryonic stem cells hold any promise at all for providing therapies? It's not in capital investment in embryonic stem cell research relative to adult stem cells (unlike state governments, private investors go where the promise is.) It's not in the number of products and therapies available from embryonic stem cells (zero --no human trials have even been attempted since no one can figure out how to turn off the rapid growth switch in these cells). From adult stem cell therapies we've already

• had quadriplegics walk (with braces --but they weren't Christopher Reeve, so I guess they don't count)
• Parkinson's patients enjoy lengthy reprieves from symptoms,
• grown mini-livers that may cure liver disease,
• grown new bladders and implanted them in patients,
• grown new spinal cords,
• relieved diabetics from their need for insulin....

To add another wrinkle, this stem-cell fundamentalism is stifling science. As Wesley J. Smith notes almost all the big stem-cell breakthroughs are taking place in other countries because our own doctors are obsessed with the massively-oversold embryonic stem cell research.

Since the Post-Gazette's editors' position is anti-science and based on no facts --indeed, is a wilful ignoring of the facts-- I conclude its position is faith-based. They read it in their secular bible and no amount of evidence will deter them from their position. Yet surely its faith includes compassion

on this matter of deep importance to Pennsylvanians stricken by these diseases who are helping family members or friends cope with them.

We had hoped better of it.

We Needn't Kill The Babies, Therefore We Must

Adult stem cell therapies just keep racking up cures. In this case, diabetics injected with their own stem cells were freed from needing insulin injections. As usual, after reporting the success of an adult stem cell therapy, the reporter lambasts the Bush administration for its opposition to the use of embryonic stem cells, whose growth cannot currently be controlled, and therefore have never been used therapeutically ever:

But research using the most versatile kind of stem cells — those acquired from human embryos — is currently opposed by powerful critics, including President Bush.

Yeah. Damn him. Getting the sick cured without killing the innocent. Being proven right every passing month. What an anti-scientific cowboy moron.

UPDATE: anti-scientific cowboy moron has an excellent statement on stem cells today.

In other stem cell news:

• Now they've found them in fat and they're being used to regrow breast tissue after mastectomy and stimulate bone growth after cancer or other illness. (We need "Ask me about my cellulite" buttons for Americans who travel among the aging elite of Europe.) Curtsy to Secondhand Smoke.
• Who's anti-science now? Scientists can even have embryonic stem cells ethically, without loss of life, through cell re-programming, if the House will let them.

Prez To The Marchers

President Bush's remarks to the Marchers for Life. Accomplishments:

I want the folks assembled there to know that we're making progress. We promoted adoption, support parental notification laws, ended federal funding for abortions overseas, and are funding crisis pregnancy programs. (Applause.)
I had the privilege of signing legislation that extends legal protection to children who are born, despite abortion attempts, allows prosecutors to charge those who harm or kill a pregnant woman with harming or killing her unborn child, as well. (Applause.) I signed into law a ban on the cruel practice of partial-birth abortions, and we will vigorously defend that law in the courts.

And promising to tow the line on stem cells:

Last summer I vetoed a bill that would support the taking of innocent life in the hope of finding medical benefits for others, and I have made it clear to the Congress we must pursue medical advances in the name of life, not at the expense of it.(Applause.)

And summing up:

As we move forward, we've all got to remember that a true culture of life cannot be built by changing laws alone. We've all got to work hard to change hearts. We will find areas where we can agree and, at the same time, work to persuade more of our fellow citizens to join this great cause. The sanctity of life is written in the hearts of all men and women. And so I say, go forth with confidence that a cause rooted in human dignity and appealing to the best instincts of our citizens cannot fail.