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German Doctors and Party Leaders Call on EU Cloning Ban; Slam Britain

BERLIN, August 16, 2004 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Germany's foremost medical associations and leading political parties called on the German government on Friday to take a firmer stand against cloning. Though cloning is already illegal in Germany, many feel that the country's ethical stand on cloning should be more vigorous, and that cloning should be banned throughout the European Union.

Friday's appeal from top doctors and politicians came after a group of British doctors, mostly connected with Newcastle University, were authorized August 11 to clone embryos and harvest their stem cells for therapeutic purposes. The Newcastle doctors are the first to receive authorization from the British government since cloning was legalized there in 2002. Great Britain is currently lobbying for EU countries to be allowed to decide for themselves whether to allow therapeutic cloning.

The United Nations is slated to consider an international treaty banning cloning later this year. The ban would include both therapeutic cloning, which was authorized in Britain last week, and reproductive cloning (cloning used to produce human beings).

The German Medical Association spearheaded Friday's appeal. "We can't allow embryos to be harvested like raw materials," association president Jörg-Dietrich Hoppe told reporters. None of Germany's three leading political parties is in favor of lifting the ban. Wolfgang Wodarg - a member of the ruling Social Democratic Party and chairman of Germany's official bio-ethics commission - called Britain's decision a "catastrophe".

A spokeswoman for the Green party said that it is up to Germany to "hold together" the nations currently opposed to cloning. Maria Böhmer, deputy chair of Germany's conservative opposition, the Christian Democratic Union, warned that in cloning, "the human being is degraded to a material," calling last week's decision by the British "an extremely alarming and disastrous development for Europe."

For more coverage read http://www.dw-world.de/english/0,3367,1432_A_1297192_1_A,00.html?mpb=en and
http://www.dw-world.de/english/0,3367,1446_A_1296131,00.html

jmo

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