White as the driven snow

Did you catch any of Bush's "Snowflake Baby" photo-op? In it, he used a number of adopted-embryo success story kids as a backdrop to push against stem-cell research. The idea is that there are some 400,000 blastocysts left over from in vitro fertilization efforts. These clumps of cells would fit within the period on this sentence with room to spare. And they're typically destroyed. According to Bush and the fundamentalists, using them for medical research to cure disease would be immoral, because they're human beings. Therefore, they should either be A) 'adopted,' gestated, and brought into an America where millions of children have no health care, or B) destroyed. Because that would be more immoral than curing, say, Alzheimer's disease. Much like they'd rather increase the spread of AIDS than encourage the use of condoms. Condoms are immoral, after all.

So how about that Snowflake program, of which the president so strongly approves? Let's take a look:

Couples must agree to adoption-like procedures: receiving families are screened and must undergo counseling, and Snowflakes allows donating and receiving families to designate criteria for each other, meet and maintain contact after birth. Adopting couples must agree not to abort any embryos.

Those conditions were fine with Bob and Angie Deacon of Virginia Beach, Va., who donated their 13 embryos after having twins and being discouraged from another pregnancy by a doctor. "With another program, to be honest with you, they could have been adopted by lesbian parents, and I'm totally against that," said Mr. Deacon, 35.

It took two and a half years to bring themselves to fill out the papers. On their forms, they said the adopting family must be conservative Christians and, ideally, include a stay-at-home mother.