[June 17,
2002]
Dear
Senator:
The National Right to Life
Committee (NRLC) urges you to support the pending Brownback-Ensign amendment to
S. 2600.
The Brownback-Ensign Amendment
would bar the U.S. Patent Office from issuing any patent on a member of the
human species, including any human “embryo, fetus, child or adult.” This “unpatentability” would cover members of the species Homo
sapiens who are created by in vitro fertilization or by human cloning, and
it would also extend to
methods of human cloning.
A patent is, of course, a
government-conferred property right.
It is a violation of fundamental human rights, including the right to
life, to confer such property rights over a member of the human family. Indeed, the U.S. Patent Office
itself has suggested that any patent on a human being would violate the
Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits on human slavery. But others dispute that position. Moreover, it was reported on May 17 in
The New York Times that the Patent Office in 2001 issued a patent on a
method for cloning primates that did not exclude humans – a patent that would
extend to any human embryos cloned by this method.
As the Times reported,
“The patent covers a way of turning unfertilized eggs into embryos, and the
production of cloned mammals using that technique. But unlike some other patents
on animal cloning, this one does not specifically exclude human from the
definition of mammals; indeed, it specifically mentions the use of human
eggs. Those opposed to cloning and
to patenting of living things say the patent is a further sign that human life
is being turned into a commodity.”
We agree with what President Bush said in his April 10 speech on human
cloning: “Life is a creation, not a
commodity. Our children are
gifts to be loved and protected, not products to be designed and
manufactured.”
The biotech industry’s push to
begin human cloning raises particularly acute concerns about turning humans into
patented property. It has been
reliable reported that some biotechnology firms wish to patent cloned human
embryos as “medical models” (see www.nrlc.org/Killing_Embryos/patentpuzzle030202.html ).
Moreover, biotech lobbyists and
their allies are currently torturing language and logic in insisting that humans
created by the cloning process will not really be human. For example, on June 14 Senator
Feinstein took the Senate floor to argue in favor of legislation to allow human
cloning if the clones are not allowed to live past 14 days. Senator Feinstein repeatedly referred to
these developing members of the species Homo sapiens, up to 14 days old,
as “unfertilized eggs,” and she even asserted that such an “unfertilized egg is
not capable of becoming a human being.”
(Congressional Record, June 14, 2002, page S.
5580)
When Senator Feinstein
refers here to “eggs,” she is really talking about two-week-old human
embryos. Her assertion that such a
two-week-old embryo “is not capable of becoming a human being” is nonsense. Even one who does not consider two-week-old human embryo
to be a human being must admit, if possessed of a shred of intellectual honesty, that one of these cloned embryonic humans if
implanted into a uterus can indeed be born as a human baby -- the same process
that has already occurred with Dolly the Sheep and countless other cloned
mammals. As President Clinton's
National Bioethics Advisory Commission, in its 1997 report Cloning Human
Beings, stated: “The Commission
began its discussions fully recognizing that any effort in humans to transfer a
somatic cell nucleus into an enucleated egg involves the creation of an embryo,
with the apparent potential to be implanted in utero
and developed to term.” (For
quotations in which NIH and prominent pro-cloning researchers acknowledge that
cloning will create a “human embryo,” see www.nrlc.org/Killing_Embryos/factsheetembryo.html )
Really, if the subject were not
so seriously, such dehumanizing word games would be downright laughable. (See “The Amazing Vanishing Embryo
Trick,” www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-johnson071701.shtml )
Yes, of course,
Dolly and all the other cloned mammals are “unfertilized,” in the
sense that their individual lives began not with a sexual union of sperm and egg
(“fertilization”), but through laboratory activation of a nucleus taken from a
single parent. That is what cloning
is – asexual reproduction.
Like the human clones envisioned by Senator Feinstein,
every one of these cloned mammals were “unfertilized” when they were
two-week-old embryos. They
were “unfertilized” as they developed in the uterus, they were “unfertilized”
when they were born, and they will be “unfertilized” for as long as they
live.
In the same fashion, if a “unfertilized” (because cloned) human embryo is implanted,
develops through the pre-natal period, is born, and lives to be one hundred, he
or she will still be “unfertilized.”
Would Senator Feinstein say that such a born human clone is not a “human
being”? Perhaps there are some who
would indeed so assert. In a press
release dated February 5, 2002, Senator Hatch said, “No doubt somewhere, some –
such as the Ralians – are trying to make a name for
themselves and are busy trying to apply the techniques
that gave us Dolly the Sheep to human beings. Frankly, I am not sure that
human being would even be the correct term for such an individual heretofore
unknown in nature.”
Remarks such as Senator Hatch’s
merely underscore the need for the Brownback-Ensign Amendment, and we urge you
to support it. We
anticipate that any roll calls that occur on cloture on the Brownback Amendment,
tabling of the Brownback Amendment, or adoption of the Brownback Amendment will
be included in NRLC’s scorecard of key pro-life votes
for the 107th Congress. Thank
you for your consideration of NRLC’s position on this
important pro-life issue.
Sincerely,
Douglas
Johnson,
Legislative
Director