“WHEREAS, several states have taken their own independent action in pursuit of developing better treatments and finding cures by implementing or proposing public funding initiatives for the development of embryonic stem cell research in their states; and

WHEREAS, the State of Illinois should maximize the use of state research funds by giving priority to stem cell research that has the greatest potential for therapies and cures that cannot or are unlikely to receive sufficient federal funding; and

WHEREAS, medical research advances that lead to better treatments of diseases and ultimately cures will help reduce long-term health care costs on Illinois taxpayers; and

THERFORE, I HEREBY ORDER THE FOLLOWING:

… The Director of the Illinois Department of Public Health shall develop an Illinois Regenerative Medicine Institute (IRMI) program within the department that will provide for the awarding of grants to medical research facilities for the development of finding treatments and cures from stem cell research.

… The IRMI program shall provide funding for stem cell research that involves adult stem cells, cord blood stem cells, pluripotent stem cells, totipotent stem cells, progenitor cells, the product of somatic cell nuclear transfer or any combination of those cells.

No funds authorized or made available under the IRMI program shall be used for research involving the reproductive cloning of a human being, fetuses from induced abortions or to create embryos through the combination of gametes solely for the purpose of research. As used in this Executive Order, "cloning of a human being" means asexual human reproduction by implanting or attempting to implant the product of nuclear transplantation into a woman's uterus to initiate a human pregnancy.”

“We write to express our grave concern about legislation currently pending in Maryland (Senate Bill 751). This bill is designed to authorize and fund human embryonic stem cell research, including the harvesting and use of body parts taken from human clones in the embryonic and fetal stages of development. This legislation, if enacted, threatens to make Maryland a haven for unethical medical practices, including the macabre practice of human fetal farming.

…The only limit on the use of cloned human embryos for fetal farming will be that no cloned fetus may be born alive.

Thus the bill contemplates the creation of new members of the human species by cloning, and their cultivation from the zygote stage through the late fetal stages for the purpose of harvesting what the legislation refers to as “cadaveric” fetal tissue.

Please pause to consider whose cadaver the tissue is to be derived from. It is the cadaver of a distinct member of the species Homo sapiens, who would be brought into being by cloning and, presumably, implanted and permitted to develop to the desired stage of physical maturation for the purpose of being killed for the harvesting of his or her tissues.”

(Source: Robert P. George, Mary Ann Glendon, Alfonso Gomez-Lobo, William Hurlbut, Gilbert Meilaender, Peter A. Lawler, Diana J. Schaub, and Benjamin S. Carson, “Letter to Members of the Maryland State Senate,” March 31, 2005; http://www.stemcellresearch.org/letter/2005-03-31_ltr-to-MD-Senate.pdf)

For a quarter of a century, progressive legal theorists have been advocating theories of social justice premised on children’s rights.  However, a long-time specialist in children’s rights sees the creation of such rights as a source of great danger and little good.  Martin Guggenheim, professor of clinical law at New York University, seriously questions “whether children’s rights serve children’s interests.”

In the first place, Guggenheim challenges the arguments of those pushing to give children the same legal rights enjoyed by adults.  These advocates of children’s rights decry society’s denial of full legal rights to children as “oppression” and “subordination,” and in inflammatory rhetoric they compare “the way Americans [once] treated slaves with the way the law limits the freedom of children.”  Such rhetoric, Guggenheim asserts, “makes almost no sense” because “children are different from adults in significant ways.”  Because of their “immaturity and ... lack of intellectual and experiential capacity,” children invariably “need caring adults to ensure they will live and grow into independent adults.  Children, at least for an important period of their lives, are dependent on adults for their very existence.” Consequently, it would be destructive and not emancipatory to enact laws “abandoning children to their rights.”

The arguments of many children’s rights advocates, Guggenheim avers, rest on “a fatally flawed premise,” namely that of “the child’s individual personhood.”  This premise, he points out, “falsely suggests the possibility and, even worse, the desirability of isolating children from the larger fabric of the society into which they have been born and are being raised.”  It particularly troubles Guggenheim that “a leading characteristic of the children’s rights movement is its propensity to separate children’s interests from their parents’.”  Labeling the separation the “most egregious error” of the children’s rights movement, he warns that “in the effort to make children more free vis-à-vis their parents, the government makes children less free in their relations with the state.”

Guggenheim strongly endorses the American legal traditions that “cede to birth parents the right to have the care and custody of their biological children and the primary authority to control the details of a child’s upbringing.”   In his view, these traditions serve the “sensible goal of providing children with their best chance to grow and be supported within a family, with an edifice of significant barriers to state control and intervention.”   After all, “children benefit when the important decisions concerning them are made by people they know best.  Current law allows a freedom within the family for self-regulation.  The degree to which children benefit from this freedom is unquantifiable.”   

This familial freedom, unfortunately, is now threatened by children’s rights activists seeking “to wrest from parents some of the control they have under current law” and then, typically, give that control to “judges, caseworkers, and children’s lawyers.” When these professionals supplant parents, they typically defend their decisions as necessary to protect “children’s rights” and to secure “the best interests of the child.”  Guggenheim is skeptical of such rhetoric.  “‘Children’s rights,’ he remarks, “has become a mantra invoked by adults to help them in their fights with other adults in all sorts of contexts.” “Children’s rights” have thus become “a useful subterfuge” for adults seeking to hide their own motives.  And though the appeal to “the best interests of the child” seems “alluring and child-friendly,” Guggenheim warns that “it is a formula for unleashing state power, without any meaningful reassurance of advancing children’s interests.  It means substituting the state’s preference about some aspect of child-rearing for the parents’.  But this hardly ensures the second opinion is better than the first.”    Substituting a court’s view of “the best interests of the child” for the parents’ view “only ensures greater intervention through protracted litigation and an almost boundless authority by the judge to regulate the family.”  

In such intervention—intervention of the sort that now has “more children ... enmeshed in legal proceedings than would have been imaginable a generation ago”—Guggenheim discerns a grave threat to “the principles upon which a free society rests.”  He also perceives a lamentable surrender of more and more of children’s lives to the highly impersonal care of “courts [that] lack the expertise, time, and knowledge of human development ... that decisions involving children unavoidably involve.” 

(Source: Martin Guggenheim, What’s Wrong With Children’s Rights?  [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005], xii-xiii, 8-17, 38-41, 245-247.)