If you thought you’d heard the last about Bush’s Solomon-like stem cell “decision” (or cop-out, depending how you look at it), think again. Congress (and many angry members of the public on both sides) are hardly about to let this issue die anytime soon.

In fact, if the nature of Bush skating right around the issue on whether stem cells are in fact a human life doesn’t sound eerily familiar to you, perhaps a quick look back to one of the most significant federal decisions impacting the issue of fetuses, stem cells, and other quasi-human entities: Roe v. Wade, circa 1973 (see, abortion).

As you can tell, the rhetoric has hardly cooled down after all this time.

Despite your feelings on abortion, it is difficult to defend the actions of the Supreme Court in their decision, which was for all essential purposes, “legislating from the bench.”

For those of you that slept through high school civics class, there are three branches of government, not one. And only one of them creates laws. It isn’t the Court.

Why assail Roe v. Wade though, you ask, if we’re talking about stem cells? Aren’t abortion and stem cells patently different issues? Not quite.

One lasting “gift” the judicial activism in Roe v. Wade has left us is a lasting tradition of legal quagmire concerning the status of life. Instead of deferring to Congress (or some other qualified body) to define where the law recognizes life beginning, the Court completely skirted the issue altogether by doing two things.

First, it invented federal privacy statute (the premise under which abortion was legalized), and secondly it invented the trimester as a neat way of laying out the time scheme in which states could and could not restrict abortion.

Yes, you read correctly. The trimester was invented by the Supreme Court as a legal contrivance, not by the medical community as some form of relevant measurement. (One is inclined to wonder what the Court would have done if humans developed over the course of a prime number of months – say 7 or 11, instead of 9).

Bush’s executive order on stem cells, allowing federal funding only for research on colonies created before August 9, 2001, similarly skirts the issue.

While it is probably implicit that stem cells wouldn’t even be a blip on the radar right now if the federal government wasn’t involved, the key issue here is that Bush is promising to deliver us another 28 years of Roe v. Wade-style legal chaos.

What is truly needed (and was 28 years ago) is a consistent legal definition on the origin of life – i.e., where life begins, be it at conception or the cutting of the umbilical cord.

Preferably this standard would come from the medical community this time instead of from the Supreme Court.

Some may say that we’re doing just fine without one so far. After all, abortion law has fluctuated very little in the past 15 years and both sides are fairly well into gridlock.

Here’s a novel question then – why should the legality of abortion depend on the partisan composition of the Supreme Court?

Or rather, why do both sides of the debate pine to “stack the bench” with justices friendly to their side?

Why do feminists act as if a conservative justice replacing a liberal one on the court would return us to the days of back-alley, coat-hanger abortions?

The answer is because without a consistent definition on life, stem cells are just an ugly legal offshoot of a legal quagmire, and thus issues such as abortion may very well be left up to the caprice of the Supreme Court, capable of being changed with the wink of an eye. (This, going back to our civics lesson earlier, is why only Congress makes laws – we can vote them out.)

Many other related issues come to mind as well – Cloning, excess embryos from the in-vitro fertilization process, Bush’s recent extension of Medicaid coverage to the fetus of an expectant mother (rather than the mother) and the list goes on.

As medical science isn’t going to come to a grinding halt anytime soon, the number of legal quandaries is just going to increase exponentially, and fiat by Supreme Court opinion or executive order isn’t going to fix any of the problems associated with this.

Ultimately, it’s insane to try to write laws without even the most core issues of definition resolved.

In all fairness, the legal origins of life may be something that is never going to be resolved by the medical community, much less implemented by the federal government, given their exceedingly poor record on science policy.

Needless to say, perhaps it would be prudent of medical researchers to do their own “skirting of the issue,” forgo dependence on federal funding for stem cell research and do medical research the old-fashioned way – under the premise of for-profit cures.

As unpalatable as it sounds, the debate is short-circuited by the free market – those who believe stem cells are a human life don’t need to buy cures derived from stem cells and no one is denied access to life-saving technologies.

Then again, the federal government will probably find a way to weasel back into the issue. It always does.

Steve Skutnik is a senior in physics from Palm Harbor, Florida.