NRLC Urges Senators to Oppose S. 2439
What appears below is the text of a letter sent by NRLC to U.S. senators on June 6, 2002, explaining why the "clone and kill" legislation sponsored by Senator Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) (S. 2439) and other similar bills do not represent steps in the right direction toward restricting human cloning, but, rather, would actively foster and protect the practice of human cloning, and therefore are worse than nothing. This letter is also posted on the NRLC website at www.nrlc.org.
RE: Sen. Specter's S. 2439 and other bills to allow human cloning and require federal enforcement of clone killing
Dear Senator:
The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) urges you to oppose cloture on the human cloning legislation proposed by Senator Specter and others, and to oppose this legislation on any other votes as well. The current version, S. 2439, will be further modified, but it will remain a bill to advance - - not ban - - human cloning.
Although S. 2439 is labeled as the "Human Cloning Prohibition Act," this label is highly misleading. S. 2439 would actually provide a firm legal foundation for a new industry based on the mass creation of cloned human embryos to be killed for research and commercial applications. S. 2439 and its variants would amend Title 18 (the federal criminal code) to foster and protect human embryo cloning, with the FBI in charge of making sure that no human embryo survives to be born. Whatever additional regulatory and paperwork requirements Senator Specter and his allies tack on to this legislation will not change and should not obscure its essential thrust, which is to establish a federal clone-and-kill policy and encourage the establishment of an industry of what President Bush called human "embryo farms."
S. 2439 and the other bills that are being misleadingly called "bans on reproductive cloning" are not "common ground," nor are they steps in the right direction. When advocates of such bills speak of "banning only reproductive cloning," what they really mean is establishing an unprecedented requirement in federal law that no member of a certain class of the species Homo sapiens can be allowed to survive. Enactment of such a "clone and kill" bill would be much worse than no legislation at all, for the reasons set forth below. We make no argument in favor of cloning for birth; rather, we insist that human cloning must be prevented by banning the act of cloning, not by requiring the death of the cloned humans.
NRLC supports the Brownback-Landrieu bill (S. 1899), which would ban the cloning of human embryos. We urge you to vote to invoke cloture on that bill, and to pass it -- as President Bush has urged, and as the House of Representatives did nearly a year ago. By lopsided margins, the public favors such a genuine ban on human cloning. When a Gallup poll in May asked a national sample if they supported "cloning of human embryos for use in medical research," 61% were opposed.
Opposition to human embryo cloning remains high despite the recent intellectually dishonest efforts by some cloning supporters to persuade the media and the public that cloning (somatic cell nuclear transfer) using a human nucleus is something other than "cloning" (for instance, "DNA regenerative medicine" or "nuclear transplantation"), and/or that the process will produce something other than a "human embryo." But many scientific authorities, NIH, President Clinton's bioethics panel, and leading cloning researchers, have long acknowledged that somatic cell nuclear transfer is indeed "cloning" and will indeed produce a "human embryo." See www.nrlc.org/Killing_Embryos/factsheetembryo.html.
In his April 10 speech on human cloning, President Bush condemned the approach now embodied in Sen. Specter's bill on multiple grounds, including this: "[A] law permitting research cloning, while forbidding the birth of a cloned child, would require the destruction of nascent human life." The key word here is "require."
If the Brownback-Landrieu bill is not enacted, what President Bush called human "embryo farms" will open for business. Countless cloned human embryos will be created to be killed for their stem cells, or to be used as patented "medical models" - - in effect, as human lab rats. The Senate should prevent this by passing the Brownback-Landrieu bill. In contrast, enactment of a clone-and-kill bill such as S. 2439 would allow and in fact encourage all of those same evils - - and then add one new and highly objectionable component: It would place the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies in charge of keeping track of countless cloned human embryos and ensuring that none of them survive. Indeed, under the forfeiture provision of S. 2439, in some circumstances federal agents could be forced to directly seize and destroy cloned human embryos ("the product of nuclear transplantation") to enforce the bill's ban on human clonal pregnancy and birth.
When asked about enforcement of his scheme at a May 30 press conference, Sen. Specter replied blithely, "Law enforcement can handle it." But some of the legal and ethical difficulties with enforcing a ban on pregnancy and birth (rather than a ban on cloning itself), as well as the impracticality and cost in law enforcement resources, were outlined in May 15 testimony submitted by the Department of Justice to a House Committee on Government Reform subcommittee (see www.nrlc.org/Killing_Embryos/Justice_Dept_on_cloning.pdf). At a time when the allocation of federal law enforcement resources is a matter of acute public concern, the Justice Department testimony warrants your careful study.
NRLC's objections to S. 2439 and other clone-and-kill bills are set forth in greater detail on the NRLC website at www.nrlc.org/Killing_Embryos/index.html.
There you will also find critiques from several organizations of S. 2076, introduced by Senator Dorgan (at www.nrlc.org/Killing_Embryos/DorganJohnson050802.html). Like Senator Specter's bill, S. 2076 would permit human embryo farming, but in addition would permit cloned human embryos to be implanted in a "mammalian uterus" and grown to the fetal stage - - even to advanced stages - - before the desired tissues or organs are harvested, so long as the implantation is not done "for the purpose of creating a cloned human being." A just-published experiment in which cloned cows were grown to the fetal stage (six to eight weeks) before being killed for certain organs, and another recent experiment in which cloned mice were grown to the newborn stage before harvesting their stem cells, were widely reported in the press as breakthroughs for "therapeutic cloning." It requires no great visionary ability to foresee that the biotechnology lobby will wish to apply these practices to cloned humans a little further down the road, and S. 2076 would allow them full freedom to do so.
In summary, NRLC strongly opposes any measure (including S. 2439 and S. 2076) that allows the cloning of human embryos and then prohibits their survival. NRLC regards enactment of such a ban on embryo survival as far worse than no legislation at all, and will score any roll call - - including any cloture vote - - in favor of S. 2439 or any similar proposal as a vote in favor of a clone and kill policy and an industry of human embryo farms. The Brownback-Landrieu bill is the only bill that prevents human cloning, and we urge you to support it.
Sincerely,
Douglas Johnson
NRLC Legislative Director