Capital Report: New Watchdogs in Washington

Abstract

The fortunes of federally chartered biomedical ethics advisory bodies are looking up. After nearly a decade when bioethics committees were either kept in suspended animation or allowed to function but given no authority, there are clear signs in Washington that 1993 will see one or more bioethics committees formed with significant power to shape public policy. Two factors are responsible for the sea change. First, in the waning years of the Bush administration there was growing frustration in Congress with White House willingness to give in to demands from the ultra-right wing of the Republican Party. The resentment began early in the Bush years. A pro-life litmus test for the traditionally nonpartisan post of director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) sent a clear message. The point was driven home for many in Congress when the administration ignored its own advisory committee's recommendation and extended a moratorium on funding for fetal tissue transplant research. Several committees in both the House of Representatives and the Senate began drafting legislation that would create ethical oversight committees to protect sensitive research. The idea was to separate true ethical conundrums from political expediency. The second factor promising change is, of course, the electron of Bill Clinton. Within days of the election, career federal bureaucrats whose political sympathies were never in line with the Bush administration began making plans to undo some of the conservative agenda enacted by executive fiat. Within days of his inauguration, Clinton signed orders overturning the moratorium on federal funding for research on transplantation using fetal tissue from induced abortions, reversing the gag order that prohibits doctors in federally funded clinics from discussing abortion as a birth control option, and permitting foreign aid to nongovernmental family planning organizations that offer abortion services. It will take some negotiating between Congress and the new administration to decide how these changes should best be implemented. Last year, both houses of Congress passed the NIH reauthorization bill that would have created a watchdog ethics advisory board in the Department of Health and Human Services. According to the bill's language, the secretary of the department would be obliged to convene the ethics board if he or she intended to veto spending for a scientific project that had already been approved for funding by a peer review panel. If the board determined that the research was ethically justified, the secretary would have to release the funds for the project. …