The honeymoon is over. Anyone who may have been mildly wooed by the first days of the Elliott Spitzer’s administration should be mighty dissatisfied by now with what is coming down the Turnpike.

On a recent evening, Kathy Gallagher, from the New York State Catholic Conference was in Brooklyn to speak to the Cathedral Club of Brooklyn about stem-cell research. She drove all the way from Albany just to assure us that things are as bad as they seem to be.

She explained how we have already lost the battle over embryonic stem-cell research because of some sneaky back door politics.

When the State Legislature and Governor finally agreed on a budget, it was in the wee hours of the morning, far from the glare of the TV cameras.

“$600 million of our tax money was marked for stem cell research, all research, some of it on embryonic stem cells,” pointed out Ms. Gallagher.

Clarifying the Church’s position on stem-cell research, she explained that stem-cell study if a perfectly good and moral thing to do. As a matter of fact, some Catholic medical centers are in the forefront of exploring the benefits of replacing sick stem cells with healthy stem cells. The problem we all should have is when scientists begin harvesting life – playing God — for the simple sake of creating healthy stem cells.

The Church’s reservation is about experimenting with embryos, the very beginnings of human life. Extracting the stem cell from a healthy embryo, in effect, ends a human life. A healthy embryo will develop into human life. It will not develop into anything else. It is human matter. It is the start of a human life.

As Ms. Gallagher ably pointed out there is no need for experimenting with embryonic stem cells because the limited amount of research on them to date has held out no reason to be optimistic about their potential as a curing agent.
“To date, embryonic stem cells have not cured or helped a single human being,” she said. “There is no evidence of therapeutic benefit to humans. It has offered only false hope.”

In fact, much more success has been had on legitimate and moral experimentation on stem cells from discarded umbilical cords and birth placenta. That is where the research should be concentrated, not on human life.

Of course, the battle here is with the pro-abortion lobby. Once legislators admit that human life is sacred from its very conception, they also have to admit that abortion is the deliberate taking of a human life. That’s why executives like Gov. Spitzer and many of our legislators are afraid. Financially, they are beholden to pro-abort groups like Planned Parenthood, etc., and they will do nothing to upset them.

What is needed, according to Kathy Gallagher is more education. She’s right. Even though we have already lost the current embryonic stem-cell research funding fight, we should be resolved never to allow this to happen again.

One simple way to stay in touch with what is happening in Albany and Washington is to belong to the New York State Catholic Conference legislative hotline. Log on to www.nyscatholic.org for the details. It’s a free service and well worth your time in the fight for life.

Next up will be the battle against Spitzer’s gay marriage proposal and his determination to keep abortion unrestricted in New York. See story on Page. 1.
In a “memorandum of opposition,” the Catholic Conference spelled out its objections to the pro-abortion bill.

It said the bill “seeks to ensure that abortions are legal throughout all nine months of pregnancy” to protect the mother’s life or health, even though the Supreme Court in 1973 defined health so broadly that it could include an abortion grounded in any claim of economic, social or emotional stress. Current New York law, not enforced because of Supreme Court decisions, outlaws abortions after 24 weeks of gestation. The governor’s bill would repeal those restrictions.

“The bill seeks to make abortion virtually immune from any state regulation or restriction,” the memorandum said.

It noted that 35 states currently require some parental involvement in the abortion decision of a minor, 32 states require some form of counseling before an abortion and 32 states restrict Medicaid funding of abortion. The governor’s proposed bill would prohibit such “reasonable regulations,” it said.

“The bill would repeal the requirement in current law that says only doctors can perform abortions,” the memo added. “The governor’s bill would allow any health care practitioner to perform the procedure: a dentist, nurse, podiatrist, social worker, physician assistant, chiropractor, midwife, even an optometrist.”

As they say, you can’t make this stuff up. But the gang in Albany thinks it has a mandate to carry out such a policy because good people like many of us still vote party lines regardless of policy.

Haven’t we lost enough in the battle for life? Let’s get smart and let Albany know what we really think.