Congress and Cloning
SMITH, WESLEY J.
Congress and Cloning No ban is better than a phony ban. BY WESLEY J. SMITH WHAT'S LESS BAD: enacting a ban on so-called "reproductive" human cloning that explicitly authorizes cloning for...
...Indeed, the whole reason to explicitly legalize research cloning is to free up research grants and private investment for this very purpose...
...Indeed, learning how to do that would be one of the goals of research cloning...
...Senate...
...The second reason pro-cloners would gain from a ban on reproductive cloning alone is that such a law would not actually prohibit anything that can be currently accomplished...
...Since no one will urge that she be forced to have an abortion, the birth of the child will be unstoppable...
...Once the country recognizes that we can have regenerative medicine and morality too, the dogged resistance to a legal ban on all human cloning will collapse, and a proper legal ban will be enacted...
...The birth of the next such child will produce page three stories...
...The "compromise" of banning reproductive cloning while authorizing research cloning is really no compromise, since pro-cloners would give up almost nothing and would greatly gain...
...Meanwhile, adult stem cells are already being used to treat human ailments such as Parkinson's disease and multiple sclerosis—the very diseases for which cloning is held out as a panacea 10 years from now...
...In reality, adult stem cells offer better and quicker hope for developing regenerative medicine...
...The birth of the twentieth or thirtieth such child will be unremarkable and the ban will soon become functionally irrelevant, regardless of the actual state of the law...
...Actually, there is no conundrum...
...ally pro-cloning media...
...It doesn't take a psychic to predict the scenarios: • Infertile couples will file lawsuits claiming that the reproductive cloning ban violates their "fundamental right" to procreate...
...Such amoral reasoning hardly inspires confidence in the durability of a ban limited to reproductive cloning, or in the long-term commitment to maintaining it of those now urging that approach...
...Not coincidentally, this is also the stage when embryonic stem cells are harvested...
...A major political campaign will be mounted, perhaps concurrently with such lawsuits...
...For those who believe that human cloning for any purpose is intrinsically immoral and dehumanizing, a pseudo-ban is worse than no ban at all...
...For those who consider such scenarios unlikely, remember this: When the National Academy of Sciences urged the government to pass a ban on human reproductive cloning last year, it did so not because human cloning was deemed morally objectionable but because it currently wasn't deemed "safe...
...Banning only reproductive cloning would accomplish absolutely nothing (in fact, as I will detail below, a ban on reproductive cloning only would lead to reproductive cloning...
...As long as venture capitalists know that investing in immoral cloning research presents a significant financial risk, the Brave New World enterprise will continue to face a shortage of resources...
...Even without a ban today, we accomplish a lot by continuing to struggle toward outlawing the cloning of human life at both federal and state levels...
...Teary-eyed couples will appear on Oprah urging an end to the ban on reproductive cloning so that they can have children...
...It would also take much of the steam out of the anti-cloning drive, which is a primary purpose behind the pseudo-ban...
...Researchers are unable at this time to develop a human clone embryo that can be implanted in a woman's womb...
...A mad scientist, perhaps from offshore, will implant an embryo into a woman desiring to go down in history as the first birth mother of a human clone...
...These cells are the targets of "therapeutic cloning" researchers, who promise to someday make embryonic clones of millions of patients, harvest the clone's stem cells, and use the resulting cell lines in "regenerative medicine" to treat various maladies without the body rejecting the cells, since they would be almost identical genetically to the patient's own cells...
...For a human embryo to be successfully implanted—whether the embryo is created via fertilization or cloning—it must develop for at least five days until it reaches the blasto-cyst stage, when the embryo has an outer lining that develops into the placenta...
...Here's the catch: Should the research cloning enterprise succeed in creating human clone blasto-cysts, the legal ban on reproductive cloning now being touted by pro-cloners would immediately be attacked...
...Far better to keep struggling for a moral public policy with integrity than surrender to political expediency and harmful half-measures...
...Indeed, such a phony law would be worse in the long run than no anti-cloning law at all...
...Iowa recently outlawed all human cloning within its borders...
...Passing such a law would also allow politicos to brag to constituents in an election year that they had done "something" about cloning (an argument that would be abetted by the generWesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and the author of Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America...
...In the meantime, adult stem cell experiments likely will continue to demonstrate awesome potential, so that one day even the New York Times will be unable to ignore the news...
...Since human cloning is now safe, they and their supporters in the biotech industry will argue, cloning should be viewed as merely another reproductive technology akin to in vitro fertilization...
...That is the seeming conundrum facing cloning opponents, since neither side in the great cloning debate apparently can muster the 60 votes needed to pass either a complete or partial cloning ban in the U.S...
...Considering the importance recent court decisions have placed on the right to reproduce, it is quite conceivable that once reproductive cloning could be done safely, the ban would be declared unconstitutional...
...Learning how to reliably create human clone blastocysts will require much time and money, assuming it can be done at all...
...The event will produce spectacular headlines and no legal consequences...
...Would society actually allow the parents of a cute baby to be jailed, much less the scientist who had helped the infant come into being...
...Accordingly, if our choice today is either acceptance of a ban on human reproductive cloning only or stalemate, we should choose stalemate...
...For example, last week the science journal Nature reported that adult stem cells extracted from the bone marrow of mice appear to be as versatile as embryonic stem cells but without the problems of tumor formation and tissue rejection...
...The first reason is political...
...Knowing this, pro-cloners have resorted to a game of "hide the ball," believing that their pseudo-ban on reproductive cloning would suffice to assuage public unease...
...Poll after poll shows that the American people want to ban human cloning...
...BY WESLEY J. SMITH WHAT'S LESS BAD: enacting a ban on so-called "reproductive" human cloning that explicitly authorizes cloning for research purposes, or passing no law at all prohibiting cloning in 2002...
Vol. 7 • July 2002 • No. 41
