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Special Report After disbanding the President’s Council on Bioethics, what kind of advisory body will Obama put together? By Elenor K. Schoen  Under the auspices of the US Department of Health and Human Services, the President’s Council on Bioethics quietly went about its work, as it had done, under various titles and different mandates, for over 30 years. However, during the week of June 8, 2009, council members received letters from President Obama letting them know their services were no longer required. The present council will be shutting its doors.
The present council was established by President George W. Bush’s executive order in November 2001. The 18 members were chosen by Bush from among a group of leading scientists, doctors, ethicists, social scientists, lawyers, and theologians. The council was chaired by Dr. Leon Kass, MD, PhD for its first four years, and by Edmund Pellegrino, MD during Bush’s second term. With a new president in office now, the present bioethics council’s term was set to expire on September 30, 2009. The abrupt early disbanding of the council led to the cancelation of a meeting planned for late June, which was to include, among other things, reflections from council members on “The Future of National Bioethics Commissions.” According to Bush’s executive order, the President’s Council was created to “advise the president on bioethical issues that may emerge as a consequence of advances in biomedical science and technology.” The New York Times reported that White House press officer Reid Cherlin said President Obama will appoint a new bioethics commission, one with a “new mandate” which “offers practical policy options.” Judging from Obama’s preliminary policies, the future reincarnation of the bioethics council will no doubt be decidedly different. Whether the new bioethics commission will function mainly as a mouthpiece for the president, or as an independent advisory board, will be made more apparent in Obama’s choices in picking a chair and members, and in creating its mandate for serving under him during his first presidential term.
THE MISREPRESENTATION OF BUSH’S COUNCIL After letters were sent out disbanding the membership of the present council, President Obama’s press office stated that the membership chosen by President Bush was considered to be “a philosophically leaning advisory group.” According to the Times, White House press officer Cherlin said the Bush council “favored discussion over developing a shared consensus.” Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton and a member of Bush’s council, agrees with this assessment, saying that from its inception, Bush asked that the council offer a variety of views on any given issue rather than try to reach consensus in their deliberations. George suggested that during the Bush presidency, the media and others believed the council membership favored Bush’s conservative religious leanings. But George denied that theory, saying that the council chaired by Leon Kass “was the most intellectually and ideologically diverse bioethics advisory body ever constituted.” Writing in January 2009 for the Witherspoon Institute on its website, Public Discourse, George explained that the notion that the makeup of the council was heavily weighted toward “religious conservatives” under President Bush was a false assumption. In fact, almost half of the 18 members disagreed with many of the president’s stances on key issues; several members had voted for Al Gore in the previous presidential election. Furthermore, on the issue of embryonic stem-cell research alone, six of the members supported the creation and destruction of human embryos for research purposes, one was in favor of revoking Bush’s funding restrictions on using frozen embryos from fertilization clinics for research, and three other members were unopposed to “therapeutic cloning,” George wrote. Council member Peter A. Lawler, PhD, Dana Professor and Chair of the Department of Government and International Studies at Berry College, believes the letter he received from Obama disbanding the council contained implicit criticisms of the group’s membership and its goals. “I was assured that ‘President Obama recognizes the value of having a commission of experts in bioethical issues to provide objective and non-ideological biological advice to his Administration,’” Lawler said, quoting from the president’s letter. He believes the implication is that Bush’s council “was non-expert, un-objective, and ideological,” and that members who are not professionals in the field of biology—such as himself—were considered by Obama to be “amateur, faith-based ideologue[s].” Lawler, like George, believes this characterization of the Bush council to be inaccurate, and points to the work and scholarship of its two chairs as evidence of the council’s expertise, as well as the value of its goals. “No previous advisory group even aimed at such a high and sensitive level of public reflection,” Lawler emphasized. He credits President Bush with having “a good understanding of the bioethical issues” owing to his “serious study of the work of Dr. Kass.” Kass served as the chairman of the council from 2001 to 2005, and has written numerous articles and books on the subjects of bioethics and medicine. He is the Addie Clark Harding Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the College at the University of Chicago and Hertog Fellow in Social Thought at the American Enterprise Institute. Kass has been engaged for more than 30 years with ethical and philosophical issues raised by biomedical advance, and, more recently, with broader moral and cultural issues. Dr. Edmund Pellegrino, who chaired the council during Bush’s second term, is professor emeritus of medicine and medical ethics and adjunct professor of philosophy at Georgetown University. He has served as director of the Center for Clinical Bioethics, as head of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, and as director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Ethics, all also at Georgetown. Both chairmen are well-respected among their peers, even those who disagree philosophically with them. According to fellow bioethicist Tom L. Beauchamp—who is a liberal by his own admission—Pellegrino is “scrupulously fair in attempting to understand and react to an opponent’s positions. He will meet the issues head-on, and he deserves the same respect from the bioethics community that I have always seen him accord to others.” Dr. Kass’ approach to the council’s deliberations was demonstrated in a teleconference in May 2005 with members of the media, in which he discussed the council’s considerations of the controversy over alternative sources of human pluripotent stem cells. He stated that even though there was a split recommendation on the ethics of doing cloning for biomedical research, the council agreed that all parties in the debate “have concerns vital to defend, vital not only to themselves but to all of us” and that no one “can afford to be callous to the needs of suffering humanity, or cavalier about the treatment of nascent human life, or indifferent to the social effects of adopting one course of action rather than another,” he emphasized. As members of a national bioethics body, Kass explained, “we are mindful of the need to understand and respect the strongly held ethical views of our fellow citizens even when we do not share them.” He stated that they would be receptive “to any creative, scientific, or technical suggestions that might find a way around this ethical dilemma and ethical impasse we face, [enabling] scientists to proceed with their research in ways that neither raise ethical questions nor violate the ethical principles of many Americans.” Though varied in their purposes and formats, the previous bioethics commissions arose out of a need for the kind of bioethical discussion Kass outlines. There was a sense of urgency that the country faced dilemmas that deserved special attention and reflection, making each commissioned group unique. Lawler believes that some of the Bush council reports—such as Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness—“will grow in public stature over the years.” In reviewing transcripts from council gatherings, he said that one can’t help but be “amazed at the sustained, smart, friendly disagreement…a real education for me.” Lawler fears that in Obama’s concept of the President’s Council, “there’s no need for such moral and political discussion, because the experts know the non-ideological and objective answers to the questions that face us in our high-tech and increasingly biotech world.” In this world, he said, “personal opinion is trumped by what the ‘studies show,’ while public opinion should be guided toward a consensus based on those studies.” WILL THE OBAMA COMMISSION BE AN ECHO CHAMBER? Council member Robert George outlined in his article on the Public Discourse website the possible directions of a future council under Obama. If President Obama follows “Bush’s lead and appoints a diverse council…his decision would ratify a certain way, entirely noble, of using bioethics advisory councils to enhance the overall quality of deliberation and debate,” George wrote. But if Obama “repudiates Bush’s openness to permitting a range of voices on the council” then he will “have established different terms for conducting the debate—terms according to which the role of bioethics councils is to advance the president’s own preordained agenda on bioethics questions [rather than providing] thoughtful argumentation enriched by the inclusion of perspectives that are critical of the president’s beliefs,” George concluded. Based on the language of the letter to Bush council members and of subsequent statements from the Obama administration, Peter Lawler sees a stark difference between the Bush and Obama approaches to a bioethics commission. “For Obama, a valuable council does nothing but offer advice to the administration,” Lawler said. “But the Bush council was actually given the additional mandate of public education, of developing a national dialogue on controversial bioethical issues.” Elenor K. Schoen writes from Shoreline, Washington.
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