Life Issues Forum
How Not to Ban Human Cloning
by Richard M.
Doerflinger
February 1, 2002
Anything that's worth doing
is worth doing well. That saying takes on new importance as we consider the
bills pending in Congress to ban human cloning.
The ban that's done
well is S. 1899 (formerly S. 790), sponsored by Senator Sam Brownback of
Kansas. This is the bill that was overwhelmingly approved by the House of
Representatives last summer. It bans any use of cloning to manufacture human
embryos in the laboratory.
Two competing bills have come forward,
Senator Feinstein's S. 1758 and Senator Harkin's S. 1893. Sponsors say they
ban "reproductive cloning" without blocking supposedly important medical
research. But these bills are not done well -- in fact, they are done so badly
that they are worse than doing nothing.
Despite minor differences, the
two bad bills have one important thing in common: They really don't ban
cloning at all, for any purpose. They are designed to let irresponsible
researchers create as many embryos as they like, and manipulate and destroy
them however they wish. These bills forbid only one thing: The act of placing
such an embryo in a womb, to allow him or her to survive.
This isn't a
ban on cloning. It allows cloning, then creates a government mandate to kill
all the clones. For the first time in history, Congress would define a class
of developing humans it is a crime not to destroy.
To call these bills
pro-abortion is to say too little. Current abortion laws allow the destruction
of human embryos, as if they had a tenuous claim on human dignity. These
proposals would require their destruction, as if they were rabid
dogs.
Morally insensitive as these proposals are, they are also
ineffectual in preventing even "reproductive" cloning. The bizarre and
difficult aspect of cloning, the part that will take months or years of
further research, is the act of producing viable embryos by this procedure in
the first place. Once this is achieved, transferring an embryo to a woman's
womb will take mere seconds. And once that happens, how would the birth of
cloned children be prevented? By imprisoning pregnant women and forcing them
to have abortions?
No, the prospect of an enforced ban of this kind is
too terrible to contemplate. If it's any consolation, the sponsors of these
bills may have no intention of enacting them into law. They are offering them
as spoilers, to draw support away from the genuine cloning ban. When the
Senate last debated human cloning, in 1998, a similar proposal was used to
undermine support for a real ban -- and then abandoned by its sponsors once
the real ban was dead.
So to address a fundamental policy issue, the
Senate may now consider proposals that are morally horrendous, legally
ineffectual and politically disingenuous all at the same time. And pollsters
wonder why Americans sometimes feel out of touch with their
government.
Let's hope Congress bans human cloning, and does it in the
sensible way offered by Senator Brownback. The other proposed cures are worse
than the disease.
________________________
(Mr. Doerflinger is
Deputy Director of the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, 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