News

WASHINGTON, February 26, 2003 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The U.S. House of Representatives will vote Thursday afternoon, February 27, on two radically differing approaches to the practice of human cloning.  The House will debate the human cloning issue for about three hours.  The House will consider first the Greenwood Substitute, proposed by Congressman Jim Greenwood (R-Pa.).  This bill would allow the mass cloning of human embryos for biomedical research, while attempting to prohibit the use of any such embryo to “initiate a pregnancy” in a human womb.  If the Greenwood Substitute is defeated, the House will then vote on the Weldon-Stupak Human Cloning Prohibition Act (H.R. 534), authored by Congressmen Dave Weldon (R-Fl.) and Bart Stupak (D-Mi.), which would prohibit the creation of human embryos by cloning.  The text of both bills is posted at https://thomas.loc.gov

The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) has sent a letter to most members of the House, urging them to oppose the Greenwood Substitute, and to support the Weldon-Stupak ban on human cloning.  The letter is posted here in HTML format: https://www.nrlc.org/killing_embryos/lettertocongressgreenwood022103.html

NRLC Legislative Director Douglas Johnson said the Greenwood Substitute “would give the green light to establishment of what President Bush called human ‘embryo farms,’” and should be rejected.  Over the past year, Bush Administration officials have repeatedly warned that any legislation to permit human cloning for research would face a veto; these warnings clearly apply to the current Greenwood Substitute and to the similar Hatch-Feinstein bill (S. 303). In addition, the Department of Justice has testified that it would not be feasible to enforce a prohibition on implanting cloned human embryos once they have been created in large numbers.