ACTIONS REQUESTED

* Write to your two U.S. senators. Urge them to support the Weldon-Stupak Human Cloning Prohibition Act (H.R. 2505), passed by the House July 31, and to cosponsor Senator Brownback's very similar bill, S. 790. Urge them to oppose any substitute measure that would allow "therapeutic cloning," because this term really means that human embryos would be created in large numbers simply to be killed in research ("clone and kill").

Also, urge the lawmakers to oppose Senator Specter's S. 723, which would authorize federal funding of research in which human embryos would be killed in order to obtain their stem cells.

The address for all U.S. Senators is:

Senator ____________

U.S. Senate

Washington, D.C. 20510

* Please write to your U.S. House member. Urge him or her to oppose federal funding of any stem cell research which would require the destruction of human embryos. Encourage the representative to support the Responsible Stem Cell Research Act (H.R. 2096), sponsored by Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ), which would expand federal funding of research on stem cells obtained from adults and from umbilical cords--without harming human embryos.

Also, refer to the chart showing the roll call votes that the House conducted on July 31 on the issue of banning human cloning, which appears on pages 30-31 of this issue. Commend or admonish your representative, as appropriate, for his or her votes on that issue.

The address for all members of the House of Representatives is:

The Honorable _______________

U.S. House of Representatives

Washington, D.C. 20515

A NOTE ON E-MAIL: If you use e-mail to write to a lawmaker, be sure to include your regular mailing address in the e-mail. Otherwise, your representative has no way of knowing whether you are actually his or her constituent.

* Send a short letter to the letters column of your local newspaper(s), encouraging citizens to contact their senators to urge support for banning all human cloning, in order to prevent the use of cloning to mass-produce human embryos for research that will kill them. Check with the paper first to find out the paper's length limit - - generally, about 250 words.

* You can greatly assist NRLC's lobbying efforts by sending a copy of any response from a lawmaker, and any local press report or editorial dealing with these issues, to:

National Right to Life Committee
Federal Legislative Office
419-Seventh Street, Northwest
Suite 500
Washington, D.C. 20004

Phone: (202) 626-8820
Fax: (202) 347-3668
E-mail: Legfederal@aol.com

Resources

For additional information on these issues, see the NRLC website at www.nrlc.org, under "Federal Legislation: Killing Human Embryos." For extensive additional information on research that kills human embryos, and on ethical alternatives such as adult stem cell research, see the website of Do No Harm: The Coalition of Americans for Research Ethics, at http://www.stemcellresearch.org/.