WASHINGTON, February 12, 2003 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives today approved legislation to prohibit the creation of human embryos by cloning in the United States. Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wi.) announced that the full House will take up the issue the week of February 24.
Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), applauded the committee vote as “a step towards preventing cloned human embryo farms from opening for business.”
The Judiciary Committee approved, 19-12, the Weldon-Stupak Human Cloning Prohibition Act (H.R. 534). The bill is nearly identical to legislation approved by the House on July 31, 2001, but never acted on by the Senate. It is very similar to the current Brownback-Landrieu bill in the Senate (S. 245). These bills are supported by President Bush, who in his January 28 State of the Union address repeated his past calls for Congress to approve legislation to ban all human cloning. The President warned in an April 10, 2002 speech that without such a law, human “embryo farms” may begin operation in the United States. (The President’s speech is here: www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/04/print/20020410-4.html ) The Judiciary Committee rejected amendments that would have permitted human embryos to be created by cloning and allowed to develop for days or weeks to harvest their stem cells or for other research purposes. However, on the House floor, opponents of H.R. 534 are expected to offer a competing proposal (a “substitute amendment”) to permit human cloning for research. Bush Administration officials have repeatedly warned that legislation to permit human cloning for research would be subject to a veto. NRLC has released a factsheet that explains what the competing bills would actually allow and what they would forbid, at: www.nrlc.org/Killing_Embryos/Cloningmediabackgrounder.pdf