Not All Cloning Bans Are Equal

As noted on June 7th, human cloning is about to begin in the United States at Harvard University and the University of California at San Francisco.  That will involve the creation of human embryos-human beings at the embryonic stage- to be studied and destroyed for bio-medical research in American laboratories.

Readers may be surprised to know that there are no prohibitions on human cloning in the United States for research or “reproductive” purposes.  Who would have thought that the United States would be manufacturing human beings for research only 60 years after our annihilation of the Nazi regime-a regime that horrified us with their human experimentation?  The Brave New World of Future Shock has landed on American soil.

Harry Reid can stop this.  The House of Representatives has repeatedly passed a human cloning ban-the Stupak Weldon Human Cloning Prohibition Act to ban all human cloning-for research and reproductive purposes.  The Senate version of that bill The Brownback-Landrieu Human Cloning Prohibition Act has not come to a vote in the United States Senate because Senator Reid and his allies oppose it.  Reid, Hillary Clinton, Diane Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, along with Republicans Arlen Specter and Orin Hatch, support a partial cloning ban that would permit cloning to create cloned human embryos for research and “therapeutic” purposes. 

Of course, they don’t call their legislation (S. 1520) cloning.  These Senators are “political” scientists and are skilled at playing politics with science.  Their human cloning ban says that human cloning is not cloning until the human clone (“the product of nuclear transplantation”) is implanted “into a uterus or the functional equivalent of a uterus.”  That redefinition of cloning allows them to call this a cloning ban.  Not all cloning bans are equal… or cloning bans at all.

Why do Senator Reid and others want human cloning?  Embryonic stem cells.  You can’t get embryonic stem cells with current technologies without killing a human embryo.  Cloning is believed to be necessary to obtain the kind of patient matching embryonic stem cells that will not be rejected by the patient.  Embryonic stem cell researchers and supporters claim that if they can just kill those human clones when they are embryos for their embryonic stem cells, they can cure degenerative diseases.

They continue to believe this despite years of unproductive research that has yielded no successes.  Embryonic stem cell research is so dangerous in animal studies that there are no human trials.  Other stem cell research called adult stem cell research uses non-embryonic stem cells from a person’s own body, umbilical cord blood, placental and other tissues that do not destroy human beings and poses no ethical problems.  There are over 65 adult stem cell cures and over 300 approved human trials.

Human cloning for any purpose is wrong because it uses human beings as means to an end without consent.  It assaults human dignity by turning human life into a commodity.  An attack on the least of us is an attack on all of us.  Once one group of humans’ right to life and personhood is disposable, everyone’s personhood and right to life becomes negotiable.  Human rights, the right to life, human dignity and personhood are inherent.  They are not earned or achieved.  They are not realized by development.

To say otherwise is to create criteria that humans must meet to gain and retain their humanity and their right to life to protect them from harm.  That is unconscionable and has led to the assault upon and tampering with human life.  The loss of human dignity is the highest price to be paid for allowing any kind of cloning and creation of one human being as a means for another.  It must be stopped.

Senator Reid needs to know that you oppose any partial cloning bans (S 1520) and that you support the Brownback Landrieu human cloning ban (S 658), which bans all human cloning, to stop the bio-ethical nightmare that is upon us.