It's naive and silly to think that a government ban on federal funds for human fetal stem cell research will not inhibit progress in that field.
Available funding is not limitless. There's a finite sum available. If one of the sources is choked off, projects may have to be put on hold while alternative funding is found. If the total funds available for all U.S. human fetal stem cell research are maxed out, and a prior contributor, the Fed, has gone off-stream, then somewhere, somebody's research project is put on permanent hold or scrubbed, when (had the Federal source not gone off-stream) it would have continued, funded. This is elementary. I'm very surprised that such an elementary proposition needs to be explained to anyone here in this forum.
To those parents of special-needs children, hoping against hope for new scientific solutions, some of which have as good a chance as any of coming out of stem-cell research, the banning of Federal funds for human fetal stem cell research comes as a direct slap in the face.
Any claim that banning Federal funding for any type of scientific investigation will not impede research on the subject is disingenuous. Federal funding for all scientific research, particularly in the life sciences fields, should be INCREASED across the board, not selectively cut back except in the clearest cases of fraud or lack of scientific value.