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Thursday, May 16, 2002 Douglas Johnson, 202-626-8820 Legfederal@aol.com

Analysts agree that legislation backed by Senators Daschle

and Johnson would permit human cloning for lethal experiments

At a press conference held today in Sioux Falls, South Dakota representatives of several organizations criticized a radio ad currently being broadcast on numerous stations in South Dakota. The ad, sponsored by South Dakota Right to Life in cooperation with the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), notes that Senators Daschle and Johnson are currently supporting bills that would allow human cloning as long as the human clones are all killed in medical experiments.

In response, NRLC Legislative Director Douglas Johnson said, “We hope that Senators Daschle and Johnson will join President Bush, Congressman Thune, and 95% of the state legislature in supporting the Brownback bill to ban all human cloning – and stop hiding behind phony legislation that would allow human embryo farms to open for business.”

The 60-second radio ad is titled, “Does Tim Johnson Favor Harvesting Human Clones?” The script and audio file of the ad are posted at the NRLC website at www.nrlc.org, along with letters to and from Senator Johnson, and other documentation of statements made in the ad.

South Dakota Right to Life and NRLC support the Brownback-Landrieu bill (S. 1899), which would ban the cloning of human embryos. The ad mentions that the Brownback bill has already passed the House of Representatives, with the support of Congressman Thune, and that President Bush has urged the Senate to pass it quickly. The ad also makes reference to a resolution adopted by the South Dakota legislature in February, with the support of 95% of voting lawmakers, explicitly endorsing the Brownback bill and condemning so-called “therapeutic cloning.”

The ad conveys that Senator Daschle is actively working to block the Brownback bill, and to advance competing legislation that allows human cloning for research. There are several versions of the competing legislation, but none of them place any limits on how many human embryos would be cloned for lethal experiments. In an April 10 speech on human cloning, President Bush warned that adoption of such legislation would result in human “embryo farms.”

The ad also notes that Senator Johnson is cosponsoring an especially controversial human cloning bill, S. 2076, that allows cloning human embryos for research – but then goes a step further by permitting even the implantation of a cloned human embryo in a uterus, unless this is done “for the purpose of creating a cloned human being.” [emphasis added] Legally, this language would permit a cloned human embryo to be implanted in a human or animal womb and allowed to develop for months – even to the final stages of pregnancy – before being killed to obtain tissues or organs. This practice of clone-grow-and-kill has already been performed with cloned animals.

On April 29, NRLC sent Senator Johnson a letter explaining this aspect of the bill, but the senator has not withdrawn his cosponsorship of the controversial measure (which has been sponsored by only two other senators).

NRLC’s assessment of S. 2076 is shared by others who have analyzed the bill. For example, in an independent analysis, attorneys at the nonpartisan International Center for Technology Assessment (CTA) wrote that S. 2076 “is the most permissive piece of human cloning legislation introduced in the Senate. . . .the legislation allows an implanted cloned embryo to develop inside a woman's uterus for an unspecified period of time. . . the legislation gives government approval and support to an industry in which human clones gestate for several months in surrogate mothers to be followed by voluntary abortion of such fetuses for use in research.”

Likewise, Richard M. Doerflinger, Deputy Director of Pro-Life Activities for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (phone 202-541-3171), wrote in a memorandum dated May 16, 2002 that S. 2076 “goes beyond past bills offered on this topic in an alarming way. It permits the use of cloned embryos to ‘initiate a human pregnancy,’ and even the implantation of cloned embryos in any ‘mammalian uterus,’ as long as this is not done ‘for the purpose of creating a cloned human being’ (by which the sponsors seem to mean a live-born cloned human being). This takes us down the slippery slope toward ‘farming’ cloned humans to the fetal stage, for harvesting of developed organs and other horrors. By essentially banning live birth, instead of banning use of cloning to initiate human development, the bill focuses its penalties on desperate infertile women and their physicians, instead of on scientists who irresponsibly mass-produce human life in the laboratory as research material. Even more unjustly, the bill would seek to impose a government-mandated death sentence on the completely innocent victim of the cloning procedure, the helpless cloned human. This legislation could be described as anti-woman and anti-life at the same time.”

or contact the NRLC Federal Legislative Office at 202-626-8820 or Legfederal@aol.com