Dickey Amendment

THE DICKEY AMENDMENT was enacted by the U.S. Congress and signed by former President William J. Clinton in January 1996 as a rider to an appropriations bill for the Department of Labor and Health and Human Services. The amendment to the appropriations bill prohibits federal funding for the creation of human embryos for research that would cause embryos to be destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death greater than that allowed for research on fetuses in utero. Consequently, this amendment also banned the use of federal funds for in vitro fertilization research. However, the Dickey Amendment only affected federally funded research and did not affect the private research sector.

Although this amendment blocked federal funding for research that created or destroyed an ...