Biotech Industry Lobby Pushing Deceptive “clone and kill” legislation
WASHINGTON, April 8, 2002 (LSN.ca) – US President George Bush will speak on the urgent need to ban human cloning on Wednesday, April 10, at 1:15 p.m. ET, in the Rose Garden. The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) in Washington, D.C. warned that the situation is urgent since “human embryo farms” are getting ready for business.
A Senate bill to ban all human cloning (the Brownback-Landrieu bill) has been stalled in the Senate by resistance from Democratic Senate leaders and intense lobbying by the Biotechnology Industry Organization. NRLC Legislative Director Douglas Johnson warned: “Senators are under great pressure from the pro-cloning biotech industry lobby to support a phony counter-proposal—a bill that would allow mass cloning of human embryos for the specific purpose of killing them in experimentation.” Identical legislation (the Weldon-Stupak bill) passed the House of Representatives on July 31, 2001, by a vote of 265-162.
The biotech industry lobby is pushing competing legislation, falsely labeled as a “human cloning ban,” which in reality would permit so-called “therapeutic cloning” (that is, the cloning of human embryos for use as medical commodities or in lethal experimentation), but prohibit the implantation of any cloned embryo in a womb, thus requiring that they die. Pro-life groups regard this “clone and kill” legislation as worse than no legislation at all, because in effect it would require the federal government to ensure that every cloned human embryo is killed. The House decisively rejected this pro-embryo-farming legislation, 249-178, and President Bush has also repeatedly expressed his opposition to it.
Contrary to many press reports, the biotech-backed legislation does not “ban cloning of a human being and allow cloning research only to produce stem cells.” Rather, the bio-backed legislation allows unrestricted cloning of human embryos for any purpose whatever. Cloned human embryos would be used for many purposes, including harvesting of their stem cells (which will kill the embryos) and for sale as patented experimental subjects, analogous to tailored strains of white mice. In contrast, the Brownback-Landrieu bill explicitly allows “the use of nuclear transfer or other cloning techniques to produce molecules, DNA, CELLS OTHER THAN HUMAN EMBRYOS, tissues, organs, plants, or animals other than humans.” [capitals added for emphasis] Thus, the Brownback-Landrieu bill would allow the use of cloning to produce “cells”—including stem cells—but not by first creating and then killing a human embryo to harvest his or her stem cells.
For further information on the two bills and other aspects of this issue, including recent radio ads produced by NRLC, see the NRLC website at https://www.nrlc.org/Killing_Embryos/Index.html