|
 ust
this summer, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote:
"[N]o one who has followed the recent debate in Congress regarding
human cloning and stem cell research — they are intertwined
— could help being impressed by the sheer stupidity of the
rhetoric, as well as the outcome." Wrote Cohen, "For all
the talk, human cloning is not right around the corner."
Tell that to
Advanced Cell Technology, a Massachusetts firm that this weekend
announced that they have cloned the first human embryos.
Currently,
the sky's the limit, legally, for enterprising scientists and businessmen
— and nuts, like Cloneaid, which jumped into the spotlight
on the coattails of Advanced Cell Technology's announcement, by
claiming to have also cloned human embryos.
At the top
of the orders of business as the Senate reconvenes from Thanksgiving
recess should be a ban on all human cloning. Ultimately, that means
passing Kansas Republican Sen. Sam Brownback's prohibition bill.
It's currently scheduled to be taken up in February or March; obviously,
something needs to happen now. In reality, a more permanent, all-out
ban might come later, with a short-term moratorium coming sooner,
latched onto an appropriations bill. It's not the ideal solution
— the ideal solution would be to pass the total ban now.
The vote, whenever
it is taken up, is unlikely to be an easy one. And with the possibility
that the Senate debate may be delayed for six months or so, the
propaganda wars will be vital these next months. As the news broke
over the weekend, talk immediately went to the "therapeutic"
and humane purposes of creating human life by cloning. And the redefinition
campaign is already well underway: The biotech entrepreneurs are
claiming that with the cloned embryos, it's not new lives, but cells
that are being created.
On July 31,
the U.S. House of Representatives voted 265-162 in favor of the
Weldon-Stupak Bill (H.R. 2505), which would ban all cloning of human
beings, including of human embryos. During the House debate, by
the sound of things, people were buying into the propaganda.
It's worth
replaying some of the highlights. In the hour preceding the House
vote, for instance, Rep. Jim McDermott was not alone in filling
the debate with anti-religious bigotry:
We are like
the 16th century Spanish king who went to the Pope and asked him
it was all right for human beings to drink coffee. The coffee
bean has been brought from the New World. It had a drug in it
that made people get kind of excited and it was a great political
controversy about whether or not it was right to drink coffee.
And so the Spanish king went to the Pope and said, Pope, it is
all right. Well, we had that just the other day, and the Pope
said, it is not right.
The Pope
also told Galileo to quit making those marks in his notebook.
The Earth is the center of the universe, he said. We all know
that. The Bible says it. What is it this stuff where you can say
the sun is the is the center of our universe [sic]? That is wrong.
Now, here
we are making a decision like we were the house of cardinals on
a religious issue when, in fact, scientists are struggling to
find out how human beings actually work. We have mixed stem cells
together with cloning all to confuse people. Everybody on this
floor knows that the best way to stop something is to confuse
people, and we have had confusion on this issue because basically
people want it to be a value-laden issue that attracts one group
of voters against others. That is all this is about. All this
confusion.
McDermott later
called the cloning vote a "papal event."
Or as the ever-eloquent
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D., N.Y.) said at hearings the previous week:
"[A]n embryo is a clump of a few cells. How can you say to
somebody who you could cure of a deadly disease 'we will not cure
you because you are less important than a clump of cells'?"
(Nadler said at another point in the hearing that the belief that
an embryo is human is a "fundamentalist" position.)
The House debate
was complicated by a bill sponsored by Congressman Jim Greenwood,
a Republican from Pennsylvania. This was a bogus ban, which would
(in theory) have prohibited reproductive cloning, but not so-called
therapeutic cloning. Pro-lifers dubbed it "The Clone and Kill
Act of 2001."
According to
the legislation, it would be illegal to use cloning technology "with
the intent to initiate a pregnancy," or to ship the "cellular
product [a.k.a. embryo]… knowing that the product is intended
to be used to initiate a pregnancy." In essence, what the bill
would have made a felony was saving the life of a cloned embryo
by implanting him in a woman's womb.
The Greenwood
bill was dangerous — and impossible to enforce, as well. As
Leon Kass and Daniel Callahan pointed out in a New Republic
piece, "to effectively ban any cloning, we need to ban all
human cloning."
Which returns
us to the present. President Bush has said that he was "unequivocally…
opposed to the cloning of human beings either for reproduction or
for research." The White House should call for immediate Senate
action on such an unequivocal ban. Even if the ban were to come
later, there should be, much sooner, some form of short-term moratorium
now.
In the meantime,
the campaign to sell cloning is moving full-speed ahead. This morning
the on The Today Show, Richard West, Advanced Cell Technology's
chief executive, dismissed a National Right to Life Committee's
statement calling for the Senate to pass a ban, arguing that the
they have latched onto cloning only because a prohibition on cloning
would end abortion, too.
If only it
were so easy.
|
