If John Kerry fulfills the campaign promise he made in last Saturday's Democratic radio address, he is truly a miracle worker. He pledged to undo what was never done.

  "Three years ago, the president enacted a far-reaching ban on stem-cell research, shutting down some of the most promising work to prevent, treat and cure Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, diabetes, AIDS and so many other life-threatening diseases," said Kerry, opening his address. He concluded: "(W)e're going to lift the ban on stem-cell research."

 This was like promising to lift the president's ban on banana yellow cars.

 The president, of course, never banned banana yellow cars. If automakers decided tomorrow there was an infinite market for banana yellow cars, they would be free to produce nothing but such cars. No presidential edict would prevent them.

 Same goes for stem-cell research. Pharmaceutical companies are now free to devote their research budgets to nothing but stem-cell experimentation. Indeed, they would be stupid not to -- if something else Kerry said in his radio address were true. "At this very moment," said Kerry, "some of the most pioneering cures and treatments are right at our fingertips, but because of the stem-cell ban they remain beyond our reach."

 Surely some of the "Benedict Arnold companies" Kerry attacked for moving abroad to evade American taxes would have used their offshore hideaways by now to produce these lucrative cures -- if President Bush had indeed imposed a "ban on stem-cell research" and if, as Kerry claims, the cures were "right at our fingertips."

 But Bush didn't, and they aren't.

 Once again, Kerry is cloaking his true policy -- in this case, taxpayer funding for cloning and killing human embryos -- in duplicitous language. 

 Three years ago, President Bush issued a narrowly targeted policy: Tax dollars could not fund stem-cell research that required killing new human embryos, but it could be used for every other type of stem-cell research. Later, Bush backed legislation, now blocked in the Senate, to ban all human cloning.

 The president's policy stopped government from forcing taxpayers to fund the cloning and killing of human beings. It also aimed at stopping America from becoming a nation that tolerated -- perhaps even profited from -- the wholesale abuse of innocent life.

  "Research cloning would contradict the most fundamental principle of medical ethics, that no human life should be exploited or extinguished for the benefit of another," said the president in a 2002 speech. "Yet a law permitting research cloning, while forbidding the birth of a cloned child, would require the destruction of nascent human life."

 His thinking comported with the ethical principles stated in the Nuremburg Code issued by the American military tribunal that tried Nazi doctors after World War II. "No experiment," said the code, "should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur . . ." Continued...