What Cloning Has Wrought

Gia Fenoglio
National Journal Magazine
August 4, 2001

"Of one thing, I have no doubt. The growing use of reprogenetics [reproductive biology and genetics] is inevitable. For better and worse, a new age is upon us--an age in which we as humans will gain the ability to change the nature of our species." -- Lee M. Silver, a Princeton University professor of molecular biology and public affairs, in his 1998 book, Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will Transform the American Family

Four years after the world said hello to Dolly, the cloned sheep from Scotland, and three years after Silver wrote his provocative book pushing cloning techniques, Congress and interest groups are discovering that a new age has, indeed, arrived. This new age has forced lawmakers to confront issues many of them would just as soon ignore. It's also scrambled interest-group alliances so thoroughly that organizations that otherwise detest one another find themselves working on the same side of the cloning issue.

Consider the debate on the bill that the House passed on Tuesday, 265-162, to ban both public and private use of human-cloning technology for any purpose. Two hundred Republicans, 63 Democrats, and two independents voted for the measure.

The bill-sponsored by Reps. Dave Weldon, R-Fla., and Bart Stupak, D-Mich.-sets a 10-year prison sentence and a $1 million penalty for scientists who carry out human cloning, whether for the purpose of creating a baby (sometimes called reproductive or birth cloning), or for creating embryonic clones to extract their cells (sometimes called research or therapeutic cloning). The bill also prohibits the importation of cloned embryos and products derived from them.

The Weldon-Stupak bill was pitted against a less restrictive one proposed by Reps. Jim Greenwood, R-Pa., and Peter R. Deutsch, D-Fla. Their bill would have banned reproductive cloning but allowed research cloning. One goal of research cloning is to find ways to heal patients using their own tissues. Embryos containing a patient's DNA would be used to create tissues or organs that could replace defective ones in that person.

It's an understatement to say that the cloning issue has created some strange political bedfellows. Ardent anti-abortion groups and a loosely organized politically left-of-center coalition have found themselves united in their opposition to human-cloning procedures. Their better-organized opponents include patients' advocacy groups and the biotechnology industry, which is represented by the Biotechnology Industry Organization, a lobbying group that boasts more than 1,000 clients.

Wesley J. Smith, a self-proclaimed Ralph Naderite who opposes all human-cloning projects, sees the irony of the situation. "It's like, pinch me, pinch me, take a picture. Who would have thought they'd be smiling at each other?" said Smith, author of the book Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America.

If a measure similar to the milder Greenwood bill is pushed in the Senate over one proposed by Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., that mirrors the House-passed bill, those who support a ban on reproductive cloning will look to see how biotech groups react. Some critics suggest that the biotech industry's support of the Greenwood bill in the House was more a matter of expediency than of conviction, and that the industry hopes to bury any anti-cloning measure in the Senate. Likewise, anti-abortion groups will have to decide whether to go along with a version of the Greenwood bill in the Senate if the alternative is no legislation at all.

What is quite clear is that in this new age, cloning opponents come at the issue for different reasons.

Some social justice advocates oppose cloning because they fear a widening gap between the haves and have-nots if affluent parents decide to genetically "enhance" their children. The United Methodist Church, which supports abortion rights, has come out strongly against the "commercialization of human life." Several environmental groups oppose any tinkering with the natural world, on the grounds that the right to clone a human or embryo would open the floodgates to additional bioengineering experiments on plants, animals, and ecosystems. Civil rights factions dread a new kind of racism and eugenics reminiscent of Adolf Hitler's Germany. Some disability rights groups worry about being viewed as misfits in a society trying to manufacture perfection. And various scientists fear both the prospect of "designer babies" and the possible defects that may result from cloning.

Much more publicized is the view of the better-organized anti-abortion groups who see cloning as a sanctity-of-life issue. "Our purpose is precisely [to oppose] the destruction of the embryo," says Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee. "There should be an honest debate whether we want to live in a country where human embryos are mass-produced."

Women are a target audience sought by both sides in the debate. Feminist leader Judy Norsigian, executive director of Boston Women's Health Book Collective, has entered the fray by calling for a ban on reproductive-cloning experiments and for a five-year moratorium on research cloning. But many liberal women's groups are reluctant to endorse her views, because she is on the same side as their archenemies: those seeking to put an end to legalized abortion. Norsigian argues that cloning technology can be developed only through "mass experimentation on women and children." Several women who are abortion-rights activists balked at any suggestion that Norsigian was speaking for them. Cloning, they say, doesn't fit their agenda, because they "don't consider it an issue of reproductive rights."

But one scientist calls this poor reasoning. "Reproductive rights and reproductive autonomy is not the same thing as doing whatever you want to with human embryos, turning them into products," said Stuart Newman, a professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College and a member of the board of the Cambridge, Mass.-based Council for Responsible Genetics. The group, which Newman terms "well left of center," lacks visibility but is fairly active in the debate. Its board is chaired by Claire Nader (Ralph's sister), and draws a fair number of its members from the New Left's Science for the People group-scientists and students concerned about abuses in science and technology.

"In fact," Newman notes, "there's a real emphasis on the harm to women by having embryos and eggs being saleable commodities. Reproductive autonomy is not [about] having the right to choose the characteristics of the next generation."

Norsigian's job with the CRG has been to enlist other feminists in the fight; so far, Ruth Hubbard, Barbara Seaman, and Naomi Klein have signed on. But others have resisted. Katha Pollitt, a columnist for the liberal magazine The Nation, calls Norsigian's belief that cloning poses a serious threat to women or to anyone else "nutty."

Yet others, such as Rosemary Dempsey, director of the Washington office of the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy Inc., are stepping gingerly into an area where several of their peers in the abortion-rights movement won't go.

Dempsey says it's premature for her group to take a position on reproductive cloning. "What's at the bar right now is the whole aspect of 'Do we let abortion politics get in the way of saving lives?' If some kind of anti-cloning bill was used to say that from the moment of conception fetal rights would trump women's rights, we'd consistently oppose that kind of thing," Dempsey said.

At a San Francisco-based organization called the Exploratory Initiative on the New Human Genetic Technologies, Director Richard Hayes is dismayed that prestigious scientists have been working to encourage public acceptance of a future of human clones and "designer babies." These advocates include James Watson, a Nobel laureate who is now president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, a research institute for molecular biology, and Lee Silver, the Princeton molecular biology professor.

Hayes's group believes that there is a middle position between that of anti-abortion activists who resist all embryo research and that of biotech promoters who oppose any social controls. "We should ban the creation of human clones," says Hayes, "and at least have a moratorium on the creation of clonal embryos." Hayes, who supports abortion rights, says that there is a clear difference between a women's desire to terminate an unwanted pregnancy and the desire to create genetically duplicate human beings. "We can support the former and still strongly oppose the latter," he declares.

Still others who want to ban human cloning hope to push the issue out of the abortion debate-because, as one ban backer puts it, "when the Religious Right comes out, Democrats get scared."

As the debate progresses, the anti-cloning forces on the left will be weighing whether to join forces, perhaps by creating an umbrella organization. That prospect seems more likely than does the chance of the Left and the Right joining hands, or even standing near each other, at the same press conference.

Cloning opponents can cite polls showing significant public opposition to human cloning. A Gallup Poll of 1,012 adults taken in May showed that 89 percent of Americans say that the cloning of humans-if it becomes possible-should not be allowed.

Prospects for a broad cloning ban passing in the Democratic-controlled Senate are not good. In 1998, the Senate rejected a bill similar to Weldon's that was offered by Sens. Christopher S. Bond, R-Mo., Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and Trent Lott, R-Miss.

CHART
Laws Abroad
While Congress grapples with legislation on human cloning, 42 countries have some kind of law on the books. Many of the laws ban both cloning for birth and cloning for research, as well as inheritable genetic modification (IGF), a process that changes the genes in sperm and egg cells to produce certain characteristics in a prospective child.

Countries that have banned cloning for birth, cloning for research, and IGF
Croatia
Cypress
Czech Republic
Bulgaria
Denmark
Estonia
Finland
France
Georgia
Germany
Greece
Hungary
Iceland
Italy
Latvia
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Macedonia
Moldova
Netherlands
Norway
Poland
Portugal
Romania
San Marino
Slovakia
Slovenia
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
Turkey

Countries that have just banned cloning for birth
Argentina
Australia
Brazil
Costa Rica
India
Israel
Japan
Mexico
Peru
South Africa
Trinidad/Tobago

SOURCES: Council of Europe; Exploratory Initiative on the New Human Genetic
Technologies; Rosario Isasi, Boston University School of Health.