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Students Used as Political Fodder in Effort to Pass Controversial Canadian Stem Cell Bill

OTTAWA, October 15, 2003 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In what the Toronto Star calls an unusual move, three Toronto high schools are being used in a pilot project to promote to teenagers the use of embryonic human beings in experimental research.

A curriculum supplement "kit" has been developed and will be sent to every high school in the country to train students in an anti-life position on the ethics of stem cell research and cloning. Students would then be encouraged to lobby their MP's, to write articles and letters to politicians and newspapers encouraging the passage of C-13 and the use of embryonic human beings in research.

The initiative was funded and produced by three of the most vocal lobbyists pushing for passage of Bill C-13, the Ontario Genomics Institute, Genome Canada and the Stem Cell Network.

In an article that appeared twice in as many days in two of Toronto's most read dailies, the Toronto Star and the Metro, Dr. Peter A. Singer of the Joint Centre for Bioethics at the University of Toronto, said, "Our vision is that thousands of students across Canada will be discussing a key issue before Parliament and going home and engaging their families in dinner table discussions of the same issue, and maybe even talking to MP's."

Predictably, the first students to use the package, which encourages students to draft legislation to regulate cloning and embryonic stem cell research, created legislation identical to C-13. It allows cloning for "therapeutic" purposes, but purports to ban "reproductive" cloning and allows researchers to create embryos for the purpose of research.

Allison Martell, one of the test project students admitted, "We all wrote legislation that did allow therapeutic cloning - with government controls." Not only does the student result match perfectly the covert intention of the Canadian federal legislation, but mirrors also the overt proposal of the Canadian delegation to the United Nations in their efforts to allow cloning for "therapeutic" purposes at the international level.

Around the same time the two articles appeared in Toronto, stories on the delay of C-13 in Parliament started appearing in newspapers and on newswire services. A Pollara study surfaced on Monday supposedly showing wide support among Canadians for experimentation using embryos and for "therapeutic" cloning.

"They must be really worried to be doing this media blitz." says Hilary White, the researcher at Campaign Life Coalition who has been providing critical documentation for pro-life efforts against C-13.

Gillian Long, of Campaign Life Coalition Youth says, "They are using the impressionable youth as unwitting lobbyists. They know that MP's love to hear from constituents under 20 and are manipulating the publicly funded education system to promote a biased agenda. Government funds will not be available to these research groups to use living human test subjects until C-13 passes and they are getting desperate."

See the Toronto Star coverage:
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_T...

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