July 31, 2001
Dear Member of Congress:
This
year Congress may face several decisions that could help forge, in the words
of Pope John Paul II, "the path to a truly humane future, in which man remains
the master, not the product, of his technology" (Address to President Bush at
Castel Gandolfo, July 23). The first and most immediately urgent of these
decisions regards human cloning.
The Weldon/Stupak Human Cloning
Prohibition Act, approved 18-to-11 by the House Judiciary Committee, is poised
for a vote by the full House. It should be approved without delay. Some
researchers have already announced that they are trying to produce a live-born
child by cloning -- despite an overwhelming scientific consensus that about
99% of new humans created by this method would die before birth, and the rare
survivor would suffer from massive medical problems. The Weldon/Stupak bill
addresses this looming tragedy at its source, by banning the use of somatic
cell nuclear transfer to create a new organism of the human
species.
This bill is carefully crafted to address only this specific
problem. It has no effect on in vitro fertilization or any other
reproductive technology in current use, but deals only with cases of asexual
reproduction which do not involve fertilization of egg by sperm. The bill
explicitly exempts any use of cloning technology to produce animals, plants,
DNA, tissues, or cells other than human embryos (including stem cells which
are not themselves human embryos).
Proponents of cloning nonetheless
argue that this bill somehow interferes with a procedure that is essential to
stem cell research. Until now, of course, these same groups were insisting
that embryonic stem cell research could be fully pursued using only "excess"
embryos created by in vitro fertilization that "will be discarded anyway." Now
they say that mass production and destruction of cloned embryos to provide
genetically matched stem cells will be needed to take stem cell research from
the laboratory into the clinic.
While the cloning debate is now forcing
such groups to admit that their earlier statements may not be true, their new
claim is also open to serious question. The National Institutes of Health's
new report on the science of stem cells cites cloning as one way to prevent
rejection of embryonic stem cells as foreign tissue, but cites other
approaches as well -- and expresses great uncertainty as to whether these
cells will provoke a significant immune reaction even without such
manipulations (NIH, Stem Cells: Scientific Progress and Future Research
Directions, June 2001, pp. 17, 63).
The scientific journal Nature
reported recently that the idea of using embryo cloning to provide tailor-made
stem cells is "falling from favour," that "many experts do not now expect
therapeutic cloning to have a large clinical impact." Even James Thomson of
the University of Wisconsin, a leading advocate of embryonic stem cell
research, says this approach would be "astronomically expensive." In light of
the enormous wastefulness of the cloning process and the damage it does to
gene expression, says the author, "many researchers have come to doubt whether
therapeutic cloning will ever be efficient enough to be commercially viable"
even aside from the grave moral issues involved. The Nature article
further notes that adult stem cell research has a distinct advantage in
this regard, for "if a patient's own stem cells could be used to grow
replacement tissues, there would be no need to worry about rejection" (P.
Aldhous, "Can they rebuild us?", Nature, 5 April 2001, pp.
622-5).
Despite the growing scientific consensus on this point, some
biotechnology companies still favor human cloning for research purposes, and
they therefore support a substitute bill by Congressman Greenwood that would
provide federal approval for the creation and destruction of cloned human
embryos. Even as a bulwark against so-called "reproductive" cloning, however,
the Greenwood bill is completely ineffectual. It explicitly authorizes and
even licenses laboratories to pursue research designed to refine the cloning
process, and in ten years automatically drops all legal barriers to the use of
cloned embryos to initiate a pregnancy. In the meantime the Greenwood proposal
even bars states from enacting any genuine ban on human cloning within
their own jurisdictions.
The framers of the Weldon/Stupak bill
understand that once a society allows experimental human cloning in the
laboratory, attempts to initiate pregnancies and to create live-born children
by cloning are inevitable. Far from offering a substitute path toward a ban on
cloning, the Greenwood proposal is an object lesson showing that this judgment
by Congressmen Weldon and Stupak was exactly right. In short, theirs is the
only legislation against human cloning before the House. I therefore
urge you to defeat the Greenwood substitute and approve the Weldon/Stupak ban
on human cloning without delay.
Sincerely,
Rev. Msgr.
William P. Fay, Ph.D.
General Secretary
U.S. Conference of Catholic
Bishops
__________________________
Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities
United States Conference of
Catholic Bishops
3211 4th Street, N.E., Washington, DC 20017-1194 (202)
541-3070
June 03, 2003 Copyright © by United
States Conference of Catholic Bishops