WASHINGTON (BP)–President Bush pressed the U.S. Senate April 10 to approve a comprehensive prohibition on human cloning, even as supporters of such a ban expressed hopes momentum had swung their way.
In a White House speech to backers of a total ban, Bush called it a mistake if the Senate were “to allow any kind of human cloning to come out of that chamber.”
The president endorsed a bill that would prohibit cloning for reproductive and research purposes. The Human Cloning Prohibition Act, S. 1899, stands in contrast to other bills in the Senate that would bar reproductive cloning but would allow the cloning of human embryos in order to obtain stem cells for research into cures for various diseases. Cloning for research requires the destruction of an embryo, an act that would be mandated under legislation other than S. 1899.
“Human cloning is deeply troubling to me and to most Americans,” Bush said. “Life is a creation, not a commodity. Allowing cloning would be taking a significant step toward a society in which human beings are grown for spare body parts, and children are engineered to custom specifications, and that’s not acceptable.”
Any law other than one with a comprehensive ban on cloning would be not only unethical but impossible to enforce, the president said. “Even the tightest regulations and strict policing would not prevent or detect the birth of cloned babies,” he said.
In addition, the “benefits of research cloning are highly speculative,” Bush said. If research cloning were proven effective, however, it “would create a massive national market for eggs and egg donors, and exploitation of women’s bodies that we cannot and must not allow,” he said.
While Bush had expressed his opposition to all human cloning previously, the White House speech was his most forceful and expansive declaration of his position to date. It came on the same day many supporters of a comprehensive ban came to Capitol Hill to make their case.
At a briefing in a Senate office building, Southern Baptist ethics leader Richard Land told a room crowded with cloning opponents the practice is “wrong. It’s terribly wrong.”
“Do we really want to be the kind of society that kills its tiniest human beings in order to help its older and bigger human beings?,” said Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. “This is in reality high-tech cannibalism in which we consume our young for our own benefit.”
Land joined other ethics and religious leaders, as well as researchers, disability activists and feminists, in supporting a comprehensive ban.
At the briefing, William Kristol, chairman of Stop Human Cloning, expressed confidence a comprehensive ban would be enacted. The editor of The Weekly Standard, Kristol called the vote on cloning the most important in the Senate this year and a test to see whether that body “will set moral limits.”
Bush’s speech and the Capitol Hill activity followed by a day an important endorsement of the comprehensive ban. Sen. Bill Frist, R.-Tenn., the chamber’s only physician, endorsed S. 1899 in an April 9 floor speech.
The bill, sponsored by Sen. Sam Brownback, R.-Kan., has 28 cosponsors, including Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, the sole Democratic cosponsor. It is uncertain how soon the Senate will act on the issue.
S. 1899 is the same as a ban adopted in July by the House of Representatives with a 265-162 vote.
While the opposition to reproductive cloning is widespread, there is support for research cloning in the Senate. Sens. Diane Feinstein, D.-Calif., and Tom Harkin, D.-Iowa, have both introduced bans that would prohibit reproductive cloning but permit research cloning.
The president’s speech also came a day after a public-opinion poll showed Americans strongly oppose research on human clones. The public rejects scientific experimentation in the area of human cloning, 77-17 percent, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
The flurry of activity followed by a week a claim by maverick Italian doctor Severino Antinori that his work has resulted in a women being eight weeks pregnant with a cloned baby. Panos Zavos, Antinori’s American partner, expressed doubt about the claim and has ended his working relationship with the Italian doctor, according to the Sunday Herald, a Scottish newspaper.
The Capitol Hill briefing included statements of support for a comprehensive ban by disabled Christian author Joni Eareckson Tada; Prison Fellowship founder Charles Colson, and actresses Patricia Heaton and Margaret Colin, representing Feminists for Life.
During the briefing, Tom Dooley, executive with an Alabama biotechnology firm, said, “As a biotechnology industry insider, I can say confidently that there are no valid justifications to produce human clones either for reproductive reasons or for the generation of human embryonic stem cells.” There are at least five major categories that are alternatives to embryonic stem-cell research, he said.
“Morality should always be elevated above money,” said Dooley, who said he resigned as president of Alabama’s biotech industry trade organization because of his opposition to the Biotechnology Industry Organization’s support of research on human clones.
Anton-Lewis Usala, medical professor at East Carolina University and the founder of two biotech companies, said allowing research on human embryos will “shake the foundation of the republic.”
The ERLC’s Land, who attended the White House speech later, told the briefing audience of the predictions of well-known ethicist Paul Ramsey, who was his professor and mentor at Princeton University in the 1960s.
“I sometimes find myself wishing I could go back and apologize to him for sometimes doubting him when he predicted that there would be a day when we could come to where we are this morning,” Land said. “In his debates with Joseph Fletcher of situation-ethics fame, he accurately predicted that we would eventually have to face the bedrock foundational issue of cloning.”
At its annual meeting in June, the Southern Baptist Convention passed without opposition a resolution condemning both research and reproductive cloning.
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