Tommy Thompson
Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s politically corrupt jobs agency, Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. (WEDC), has wasted millions of taxpayer dollars through apparently shady giveaways benefitting Republican campaign donors and passing out enormous loans to unreliable companies with minimal financial screening or oversight.
Now Republicans are upset because WEDC has done something they consider far worse.
Incredibly, they object to WEDC providing financial assistance to the state’s successful biotechnology industry, whose research and commercial applications not only create thousands of high-quality jobs in Wisconsin, but also save millions of human lives.
And Walker and Republicans aren’t just spouting the usual right-wing nonsense. They’re writing legislation that could criminalize engaging in such valuable, life-saving work.
The destructive move brazenly trashes the work of Tommy Thompson, a former conservative Republican governor who sometimes succeeded in preventing his party from doing its worst.
Thompson played a key role nationally in writing ethical rules protecting the state’s biotechnology industry the last time a Republican president tried to shut down such an important part of our economy to please right-wing extremists.
Perhaps nothing better illustrates the difference between Walker and Thompson, a Republican who looked out for the best interests of his state and humanity at the same time, instead of taking the radical Republican positions Walker has to advance his own political career at the expense of everyone else.
Thompson found himself in a perfect position to protect Wisconsin’s role in vital medical research as President George W. Bush’s secretary of Health and Human Services.
Bush, an anti-abortion politician, was ready to side with radical Republican opponents of embryonic stem cell research, a revolutionary field pioneered in Wisconsin that holds real hope of producing cures for cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, spinal cord injuries and other devastating conditions.
Even though the research used unneeded, surplus embryonic cells that fertility clinics otherwise would have destroyed, abortion opponents, who are frequently prone to wild exaggeration, equated doing medical research on human cell lines with Dr. Frankenstein-style experiments on actual babies.
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Thompson, an anti-abortion Catholic himself, knew better. Thompson supported stem cell research from its very beginning, when Jamie Thomson, a cell biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, isolated the first embryonic cell line for research in 1998.
Arguing that every American had a relative or friend who’d suffered from diseases like cancer, Parkinson’s or dementia, when the president announced restrictions on new stem cell lines in August 2001, Thompson persuaded Bush to exempt existing stem cell lines already being used worldwide in research.
It was a significant achievement in Thompson’s career that has already benefitted millions by helping to create vaccines and medical treatments for a wide range of diseases.
Science under Attack
Sad to say, by the time Thompson ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 2012, he couldn’t even boast about his accomplishment because Walker had moved state Republicans so far to the right politically that life-saving scientific research and biotechnology were suddenly under attack by abortion opponents.
That’s the source of the Republicans’ current assault on cell research, further exacerbated by selectively edited videos taped by abortion opponents to show California Planned Parenthood officials discussing the financial value of cell lines from body parts of aborted fetuses.
Never mind that it’s already against the law to buy or sell tissue from aborted fetuses in Wisconsin and researchers and biotech companies here don’t do it. But almost all cellular research uses existing cell lines protected through Thompson’s efforts, some originally derived from fetal tissue decades ago.
Nearly 700 UW-Madison faculty members signed a statement opposing a bill in the Legislature to outlaw the use of cell lines derived from fetal tissue that could shut down life-saving research benefitting millions.
It’s a sick, twisted definition of claiming to be pro-life to sacrifice so many lives devastated by fatal diseases and congenital conditions. But, who knows, maybe some of those lives saved by curing deadly diseases could turn out to be females who think they have a right to decide for themselves whether or not to terminate a pregnancy.
Republicans talk as if no one could possibly be in favor of allowing women choosing abortion to donate fetal tissue for scientific research. But why shouldn’t something positive come out of what can be a depressing personal decision?
There’s just something about Planned Parenthood that causes Republicans to babble nonsensically. Even Jeb Bush, allegedly one of the more rational Republican presidential candidates, recently said Planned Parenthood shouldn’t get a cent of federal money “because they’re not actually doing women’s health issues.”
Apparently, nobody’s told Jeb about the millions of cancer screenings, STD tests and other women’s health services Planned Parenthood has provided for nearly a century.
In fact, anyone who truly opposes abortion instead of just posturing for right-wing political gain should appreciate the overwhelming number of abortions Planned Parenthood prevents year after year by distributing contraceptives to prevent unwanted pregnancies.
