Killing Cloning
At the top of the orders of business as the Senate reconvenes from Thanksgiving recess should be a ban on all human cloning.

By Kathryn Jean Lopez, NRO executive editor
November 26, 2001 1:20 p.m.

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.