The wife of U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson had breast cancer. The daughter of Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., suffers from diabetes. Their health issues must certainly affect their families — but they also may affect yours.
Thompson and Thurmond are among the high-profile public officials who cited the medical condition of a family member when explaining their support of federal stem-cell research. The potential benefits of such research caused both of these Republicans — and others — to break with their usual political allies on this controversial issue.
"Each of us, as United States senators, comes to ... this public place with the sum of our beliefs, our personal experience and our values, and none of us checks them at the door," said Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., an abortion opponent who supports stem-cell research. Parkinson's disease, whose victims could benefit from that research, killed his grandmother, an uncle and a cousin, former congressman Morris Udall, D-Ariz.; it now afflicts his brother-in-law.
The debate that continues in the wake of President Bush's decision last week to allow limited federal stem-cell research highlights the often-overlooked role of personal experience in how legislators vote — and what legislation they introduce.
Capitol Hill legislators often support more research funds for an illness after they or a relative has faced it. For example, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, R-Texas, asked for $250 million for research on blood cancer, from which her brother suffers. A prostate-cancer survivor, Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, has been a leader in increasing money for studying that disease.
Some see a problem in using subjective family experience to determine legislative action. I think firsthand knowledge leads to more informed, empathetic decision-making. But the personalization of public policy does point out how random legislative attention can be — and how real the potential is for the government to overlook some important issues.
Until the early 1990s, federal research funding for women's health was a fraction of men's — not because of any specific effort of the male-dominated Congress to discriminate, but because there were so few women in office to point that out. It was a sin of omission corrected when more women were elected to Congress and the first woman, Bernadine Healy, was chosen to head the National Institutes of Health.
To try to avoid that type of legislative omission, Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., regularly works a day at a different job in his state. Graham got the idea when a teacher challenged him after an education speech: "I am sick to death of you politicians telling teachers how to do their job better when you don't know what you're talking about." So Graham taught civics in a Miami high school for a term; student overcrowding led him to add school construction funds as governor. As of today, he will have tried out 371 jobs.
Of course, a day in someone's shoes doesn't guarantee an empathetic politician. But it does make it less likely that Graham will completely overlook the viewpoints of some part of his constituency.
Similarly, House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., acknowledged that caring for his elderly mother gave him a new appreciation for long-term care: "Unless you've gone through something," he said, "you really don't understand it."
In politics, diversity is usually viewed in terms of skin color, ethnicity or gender. But the stem-cell-research debate shines new light on how diverse personal experiences also can affect government, particularly when it comes to health issues. We all should be more aware of this. A rich diversity of experience among our legislators is invaluable — but the health afflictions of a senator's family should not end up deciding the health priorities of our government.
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