Rainville backs embryonic stem cell research

By Kathryn Casa | Vermont Guardian

Posted August 17, 2006

ROCKINGHAM — Republican U.S. House candidate Martha Rainville said Wednesday that she fully supports ongoing embryonic stem cell research as a way to improve the quality of life of those living with chronic disease.

“We don’t even know what we don’t know,” said Rainville, who was touring the employee-owned Chroma Technology Corp., a multimillion-dollar employee-owned Vermont company that makes optical filters.

Rainville said she supports using unwanted embryos from fertility clinics that “would have been disposed of anyway.”

“Those clusters of cells … hold a lot of promise,” she commented.

Rainville’s spokesman, Brendan McKenna, said the candidate would have supported a bill quashed last month by Pres. George Bush — in the first veto of the first of his presidency — that would have lifted federal restrictions on the use of embryos for research.

Surrounded by children produced from frozen embryos, Bush said he opposed the bill because it "would support the taking of innocent human life in the hope of finding medical benefits for others.”

Asked Wednesday whether she believed the embryos constituted human life, Rainville commented that she was “not a scientist.”

Mark Shepard, a state senator from Bennington and her GOP challenger in the September primary disagrees. Shepard believes that if taxpayer dollars are spent are spent on private research they should be spent on efforts that show promise.

“I think the reason that the embryonic stem cells get all the attention is because it’s become a debate about whether you think it ends a human life or not. And, while it’s getting all the press, it’s not giving any solutions,” Shepard said.

Shepard said in the studies he’s reviewed, adult stem cell research has helped to develop more than 50 treatments. Embryonic stem cell research, on the other hand, he says, has produced none.

“The problem is that this has become a political issue more than a scientific one because it forces you to be either pro research or against research, without realizing the research hasn’t produced any results," Shepard added.

On a different topic, abortion, Rainville believes that "a woman has a fundamental right to choose what happens to her own body," McKenna said, but she supports parental notification laws and "a restriction of abortion in terms of the partial-birth abortion bans."

It was one of several areas where Rainville attempted to distance herself from Republicans in Congress and the White House — a separation that has been a steady drumbeat for the former Vermont National Guard adjutant general.

After touring the Rockingham facility on Wednesday, Rainville met briefly with a half dozen Chroma employees including CEO Paul Millman, who asked her why “a really smart person like yourself, at this time, with these issues, would want to run as a Republican … given that our great senator, Jim Jeffords, couldn’t be independent within this Republican Party and had to leave it.

“If I wanted to do it the easy way, I would not have run as a Republican, frankly,” she said.

Rainville returned to the theme of her candidacy announcement, saying that she was “disgusted with what I see” in Washington and hoped to work for change from within. Congress “needs to change the way it does business” on the important issues of the day, including the cost of prescription drugs, stabilizing Social Security, health care, the economy and “making sure we’re all free to do that in a peaceful world,” she said.

She said she chose to run as a Republican because she agrees with the fundamental values of the party, including a strong national defense.

“I believe in peace, and I believe peace is attainable if we have a strong defense. I believe in real fiscal responsibility on the part of the government … and I believe in individual responsibility and accountability,” Rainville told the Chroma employees. “But I believe that because I believe in the power and the spirit of the individual, if we as a government look at our policies and make sure we don’t stifle that spirit and individuality, then we can best help our young people and our country to be successful.”

She used Chroma as an example. The company started some 15 years ago with five employees and has grown to a 81-worker employee-owned operation that last year shipped $17.6 million worth of products and hopes to expand that to $19 million this year, Millman said.

“Here I heard a lot about creativity and doing things your way,” Rainville said. “You need the least amount of government interference to do that.”

Millman, who is also vice chairman of the Vermont Employee Ownership Center, did not appear to completely agree. Earlier, he told Rainville that both U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, and Rep. Bernie Sanders, an independent, were instrumental in bringing nearly $150,000 in federal grants and loans into Vermont to support employee-owned businesses, while Vermont’s Republican governor, Jim Douglas had done little to support such efforts.

Douglas spokesman Jason Gibbs did not immediately return a call for comment.