Posted on 12/27/2002 9:58:17 PM PST by victim soul
On July 10, 2002 the President's Council on Bioethics, under the chairmanship of Leon R. Kass of the University of Chicago, submitted to President George W. Bush a Report entitled Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry, in which the Council fell short of recommending the total ban on human cloning which the president had strongly called for. A month earlier, in mid-June, it had become clear that the US Senate would not enact-would not even debate-the bill sponsored by Kansas Senator Sam Brownback that would have prohibited all human cloning.
Almost a year earlier the House of Representatives had passed a ban on all human cloning, sponsored by Dave Weldon of Florida and Bart Stupak of Michigan. This bill carried the House by the large margin of 265-162, and President Bush had promised that he would gladly sign the legislation once the bill (or an acceptable substitute) emerged successfully from the Senate. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle had promised to allow both a substantive debate on cloning and a vote on the Brownback bill (along with votes on competing bills, which would have banned human cloning for the purpose of reproduction, but not for other research).
The prospects for a total ban on human cloning seemed quite auspicious. Polls indicated that the American public overwhelmingly favored prohibiting the cloning of human embryos for any purpose. A Gallup poll taken in May, 2002, found 61 percent of Americans taking this viewpoint; an earlier one taken by the Pew Research Center the month before had found no less than 77 percent in favor of a total ban.
Following a claim made in November, 2001, by the Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) company in Worcester, Massachusetts, that it had successfully cloned a human embryo, which had then lived for a brief period, the public outcry was sharp and considerable. "We should not as a society grow life to destroy it," President Bush declared. Several senators publicly expressed repugnance and dismay at the very idea of human cloning. "Ghoulish work," said one.
Similarly, the President's Council on Bioethics-which was formed by President Bush at the time of his decision on August 9, 2001, to allow federal support for limited embryonic stem-cell research, with its members appointed in mid-January 2002-began its work with the expectation that it would be severely critical of human cloning experimentation. The chairman, Leon Kass, was well known for his anti-cloning views. And after all the Council's members had been chosen by President Bush, whose own public statements had been clear on the issue. At the time it began its work, the Council was seen and criticized by scientists and researchers who felt that the panel was heavily weighted in favor of providing the case against human cloning which the President wanted.
But in fact, in its Report submitted to the president, the Council adopted a compromise position. While all seventeen of its active members favored banning what the Council (in the awkward special terminology it adopted) called "cloning-to-produce-children," only ten of these members opposed what the Report styled "cloning-for-biomedical research." Even those ten were not necessarily in favor of a permanent prohibition of cloning for research purposes. Hence the actual recommendations of the majority was for a four-year moratorium on all human cloning-during which period the whole question could undergo further in-depth study and debate under federal government auspices. Meanwhile, seven members of the Council actively favored allowing cloning for biomedical research, subject only to what in the Report was called "a prudent and sensible regulatory regime."
CROSSING A MORAL BOUNDARY
As the Report itself noted, "the Council, reflecting the differences of opinion in American society, is divided regarding the ethics of research involving cloned embryos." Thus it seemed that a funny thing had happened on the way to banning human cloning in the United States. Up until the very eve of these developments, the very idea of human cloning had been regarded with near-universal moral horror. Now, just as the US Senate had turned off what had seemed to be a clear and open road toward the total prohibition of human cloning, so the President's prestigious Council on Bioethics was unable to achieve a consensus against crossing one of the most significant moral boundaries in the history of the human race--against allowing the creation of cloned human embryos for the express purpose of experimenting upon them and destroying them in order to extract their stem cells, for the (still wholly theoretical) therapeutic benefit of others. What now seemed in prospect instead of a ban on such activity was federal government approval, or at any rate a legislative and regulatory impasse which would allow current human cloning experimentation to go on unimpeded.
The White House reacted to the transmittal of the Council's Report with a statement that the Council's divided opinion would not change President Bush's personal opposition to human cloning. "His position is based on principle," a White House spokesman explained. "Any attempt to clone a human being is morally wrong."
Senator Sam Brownback, sponsor and principal promoter of the bill which was supposed to have prohibited human cloning once and for all, declared himself "heartened that the Council has endorsed a temporary ban&[which] would give the country an important opportunity to further debate the issue of human cloning along with its ultimate impact on humanity."
At the same time, Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a supporter of a competing bill that would specifically allow human cloning for research purposes, noted that it was "significant that even the President's hand-picked panel of advisors rejected an outright ban on this promising medical research." Senator Kennedy added: "I'm optimistic that Congress will reject a moratorium as well." He continued: "This ground-breaking research offers great hope for patients with cancer, diabetes, Parkinson's disease, and other serious illnesses, and it deserves to go forward."
The Massachusetts senator here illustrated the kind of thinking that has now led American society to the point where we are apparently able to abandon the most firmly fixed moral principles, provided only that some perceived (or merely promised) good or benefit is the motive for our action. It is instructive to examine how and why the moral debate has reached that point.
THE STEM-CELL DEBATE
To understand the situation properly, we have to go back to the decision announced by President George W. Bush on August 9, 2001, allowing some federal support for research on embryonic stem-cell lines derived from human embryos created for in-vitro fertilization (IVF). At the time, President Bush intended his decision to apply only to existing embryonic stem-cell lines; he specifically declined to sanction the destruction of further embryos to create new embryonic stem-cell lines. His decision at the time was actually considered a "pro-life" compromise; he angered some researchers who considered his decision to be an undue limitation on their scientific freedom.
As he announced that decision, the President also announced the formation of his Council on Bioethics, which would examine comprehensively the problems posed by new biotechnologies. It had become clear that research on stem cells was only part of a much larger picture; cloning itself was now looming insistently before us.
Stem-cell research has been a central factor in the whole cloning issue, ever since scientists discovered the remarkable properties of these cells, about five years ago. Stem cells have the potential to develop into different kinds of body cells, and they could therefore potentially be used as replacement cells to alleviate or even cure certain types of degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, diabetes, and the like. Any such cures, however, even if they prove possible, lie far into the future. Nor is it even clear that stem cells taken from embryos are necessary for successful cures, since some studies using adult stem cells show promise as great as, or greater than, those using embryonic stem cells.
Nevertheless the development of research using stem cells derived from human embryos has been steady and the clamor for government approval--and government support--has been unremitting. Up to now, the stem cells used have mostly been extracted from embryos created for use for possible in-vitro fertilization (IVF). One of the principal arguments for stem-cell research, in fact, was that the embryos involved were "spare" embryos created in IVF clinics that were "surplus" to the needs of the couples who were seeking to arrange a single pregnancy.
These embryos were thus slated for destruction anyway. If they were just going to be destroyed, the reasoning went, why should they not be exploited for their stem cells? What could be the harm? What could be more reasonable? It was even said at the time that no other source of embryonic stem cells would ever be required except these already doomed "spare" embryos frozen in IVF clinics around the country. When Senator Arlen Specter from Pennsylvania introduced legislation designed to overturn President Bush's restrictions on federal funding for stem-cell research his bill specified that stem cells could only be derived from embryos created for IVF purposes; Independent creation of embryos for stem-cell research would have been expressly forbidden even under Specter's legislation. That was last year. SKILLFUL LOBBYING
Virtually as soon as President Bush made his decision to allow even limited embryonic stem-cell research, however, the issue of cloning embryos, to be harvested for their stem cells, quickly came to the fore. Researchers were suddenly saying-although they had no doubt been aware of it all along-that stem cells taken from a clone fashioned from a patient's own body cells might not produce the same immune reaction and possible rejection as would stem cells from an IVF donor embryo.
As long as the aim had been to secure the legitimacy of embryonic stem-cell research in general, this important fact about bodily immune reactions passed unmentioned. Once embryonic stem-cells research as such was legitimized by President Bush's approval, then suddenly the advantages of "custom" cloning from the patient's own body were advocated--first as desirable, and soon as necessary for the further progress of biomedical research. In a little more than a year, the cloning of human embryos thus moved from being unthinkable to being the latest biomedical "necessity."
In the Senate, the biotech lobby--consisting of scientists, biotech companies, advocates for patients suffering from various diseases, and a number of prominent liberals--mounted a formidable effort in order to break down the resistance of those senators who might still see all of these developments as an impermissible venture into the Brave New World. Having already succeeded in pressuring President Bush to go back on a campaign promise that he would not allow federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research at all, the biotech lobby now set out to create a favorable climate of public opinion for the same outcome, with an astute campaign employing celebrities and movie stars such as Muhammad Ali, Christopher Reeve, and Michael J. Fox, whose much-publicized illnesses might in theory be treated with the help of the proposed research.
One of the crucial strategic moves by which the biotech lobby was able to make some cloning appear to be both possible and desirable was to agree strongly and even vociferously that cloning for the purpose of implanting a cloned embryo in a woman--in order to bring to birth an actual cloned baby--should be banned. This particular undesirable prospect was given the name "reproductive cloning," and even the proponents of cloning for research purposes agreed that it was neither needed nor wanted.
A distinction was made, in other words, between the cloning of an embryo and the implantation of the cloned embryo in order to bring about an actual pregnancy. By joining noisily in the argument against any "mad scientists" who might try to produce cloned babies, at the same time that they touted the advantage of cloning embryos for experimental use, the proponents of cloning for research were able to have it both ways. The kind of cloning (for research only) that they advocated was given the appealing but misleading name of "therapeutic cloning"--since it was only intended to develop "cures" (although it was scarcely "therapeutic" for the embryos who were created solely to be destroyed by the extraction of their stem cells).
THE CASE FOR A FRAUDULENT "BAN"
In mid-January, 2002, a panel of experts convened by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) issued a report-timed to coincide with Senate hearings being held at the time-which strongly urged the Senate to approve therapeutic cloning. The panel's chairman, Irving I. Weissman, a professor of cancer biology at Stanford University, declared that a ban "would certainly close avenues of promising medical and scientific research." And then, as if to underline their own responsibility and moderation, the NAS panel members also pointedly urged the Senate not to approve any so-called reproductive cloning. "This should not now be practiced," the panel's report stated. [emphasis added]"It is dangerous and likely to fail." The scientists congratulated themselves on being so responsible and moderate as to exclude reproductive cloning. "It is a serious matter for a group such as ours," Weissman added, "to recommend any form of restriction on research" [emphasis added]
Thus "reproductive cloning" remained taboo--at least for the moment--even in pro-cloning circles and among those who did not seem unduly disturbed by the moral lines that were being crossed in the name of scientific research. The goal of the biotech lobby was to get a bill banning reproductive cloning alone, and proclaim it as a ban on human cloning. Some senators proved only to happy to oblige. In January, 2002, California's Senator Dianne Feinstein, along with eight other co-sponsors including Ted Kennedy and New York's Hilary Rodham Clinton, introduced a bill dishonestly labeled a "human cloning prohibition," which specifically allowed the cloning of human embryos for research, and simply prohibited their implantation in a woman's womb. A similar bill was sponsored by Iowa Senator Tom Harkin and Pennsylvania's Senator Specter, among others; this bill too was presented by its sponsors as a "ban." There can be little doubt that these bills were aimed at countering the Brownback bill, which really would have instituted a true ban on human cloning.
The contradictions and absurdities that result from trying to make essentially semantic distinctions in order to overcome moral barriers would be laughable if the stakes were not so high. The supposed distinction between a reprehensible "reproductive cloning" and a laudable "therapeutic cloning" is a false and dishonest distinction. Cloning is cloning whatever the reason for doing it. The President's Council on Bioethics at least scored a point for honesty when it decided to drop these terms--coined as they were for political purposes--and spoke plainly about cloning-to-produce-children and cloning-for-biomedical-research.
BAD SCIENCE, GOOD PUBLICITY
Unfortunately the earlier successful lobbying campaign in favor of allowing embryonic stem-cell research, culminating with President Bush's approval of that practice (even if only on a limited basis), had already demonstrated how effective obfuscation and even dishonesty can be. While public opinion may still oppose cloning, and even perhaps stem-cell research as well, public opinion can be manipulated, and legislators can be deflected by skillful lobbying away from the course favored by public opinion. During the first six months of 2002, America witnessed a classic case of such successful lobbying, which effectively doomed the Brownback bill. Even before the Council on Bioethics issued its Report in July, it had become pretty clear that the Brownback bill would not be enacted, and the prospects for a true legal prohibition on human cloning were foreclosed.
The lobbying effort, led by the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research (CAMR), was as effective as the earlier one in favor of embyronic stem-cell research. Hollywood figures were again brought in. So were forty Nobel laureates, the American Medical Association (AMA), and the National Academy of Sciences. Republican luminaries such as former President Gerald Ford and Nancy Reagan were persuaded to support the cause of therapeutic cloning. Later on, in mid-August, the American Bar Association (ABA) joined the crowd.
Providing crucial political savvy and assistance to CAMR was former Florida Senator Connie Mack--who, during his legislative career, had earned solid pro-life credentials. A cancer survivor and a long-time proponent of government-funded research, and now himself a lobbyist for the biotech industry, he was influential in getting the prize "catch" of the cloning lobby to come on board. This was conservative Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, once considered a pro-life leader in the Senate (he was even once the sponsor of a Human Life Amendment in Congress). Hatch, apparently also influenced by the views of a cancer research institute in Salt Lake City, told USA Today that "human life...begins in the mother's nurturing womb, not when the clone is created in the laboratory."
Unfortunately, this was the level of scientific rigor on which the pro-cloning forces planned to let the debate proceed. Defending her bill on the Senate floor, Senator Dianne Feinstein repeatedly referred to human clones as "unfertilized eggs," and asserted that such an "unfertilized egg is not capable of becoming a human being." A daughter of one of the Hollywood liberals and patient advocates, Tessa Wick, an 11-year-old diabetic, age 11, received extensive publicity when she reproached Senator Brownback and his allies for favoring "a clump of cells" over her. "It's scary to me that this guy that I don't even know could do that," she said. "It's like he's killing me."
Faced with this kind of campaign, anti-cloning groups such as the National Right to Life Committee tried to fight back with such efforts as spot television ads in the states of key senators, warning of the dangers of "embryo farms"-a prospect that is only too likely, as a matter of fact. Even President Bush explicitly declared himself fearful of the prospect of "embryo farms" and of "a society in which human beings are grown for spare body parts and children are engineered to custom specifications." On April 10, 2002, the President delivered a very strong address against human cloning to an audience of nearly 200 lawmakers, religious leaders, bioethicists, scientists, and patients gathered at the White House. "We must prevent human cloning by stopping it before it starts," the president declared. "No human life should be exploited or extinguished for the benefit of another."
One response to the President's address was a condescending editorial in the New York Times the next day. President Bush was taken to task for his "narrow morality." The Times praised the 40 Nobel Prize winners who issued their pro-cloning research statement on the same day as the President's speech. Although the main preoccupation of these Nobel laureates seemed to be the possibility of losing the talents of promising research scientists, who might migrate to other countries where cloning research was legal, the Times nevertheless saw them as occupying "the higher moral ground."
A WINDOW CLOSES
As is so often the case in Washington, the end result of the lobbying campaigns was something of an anti-climax. Senator Brownback, in mid-June, found himself reluctantly unable to agree with Majority Leader Daschle's proposal that his bill should be brought up first and voted upon-ahead of the competing Feinstein and Harkin bills. Brownback no doubt rightly feared that if his measure failed-and he did not have the 60 votes necessary to ensure that it would pass without crippling amendments-then some of his supporters might vote for the Feinstein bill in order to go on record against some kind of a "ban" on cloning. "The process was rigged to have an outcome that would be pro-cloning," the Kansas senator complained.
In subsequent weeks, Senator Brownback attempted to achieve his anti-cloning aims by offering amendments to several other pieces of legislation. he even reverted to proposing a two-year moratorium on human cloning instead of a total ban; but none of these efforts was successful, and he even found himself deserted by some of his anti-cloning Senate allies.
At the same time, Senator Feinstein, now joined by Senators Harkin and Specter in backing a single bill, said that she would "press ahead" with her version of a pseudo-ban. But her bill, even if approved by the Senate, would never pass the House; nor would it be signed by President Bush.
What this stalemate means is that human cloning will now probably remain unregulated in the US for the indefinite future, except in the few states that have banned it or will ban it. Nor does there seem to be any strong sentiment for the four-year moratorium recommended by the President's Council on Bioethics. So current experimentation will simply go on; there is nothing to prevent it. This may have been the real aim of the pro-cloning forces all along: human cloning may be a fait accompli by the time any new efforts to prohibit it can be organized.
The failure of the Senate to pass the Brownback bill thus proved to be a major catastrophe. With the successful House action, and the President prepared to sign a true anti-cloning measure, there was a window of opportunity that is not likely to be opened again soon.
THE SCHOLARLY PERSPECITVE When we turn from the US Senate battle and to the Report of the President's Council on Bioethics--entitled Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry--we find ourselves in a very different atmosphere. But the ultimate result is regrettably similar.
The Report is a serious, sober, and impressive product. (It is available on the internet at http://www.bioethics.gov). It is remarkable, in the present climate, amid all the sophistries and obfuscations that the pro-cloning forces have shamefully promoted, that such an objective and accurate account of the whole issue could be produced. Kass and his colleagues deserve great credit for the Report. Even if they were unable to reach a consensus, they have demonstrated that the human cloning issue can be rationally and civilly discussed; and they have laid out the issue in all of its essential aspects, so that an informed citizenry ought to be able to deal with it responsibly.
However, in the end the members of the Council were unable to reach a consensus concerning the ethics of human cloning. What this means in practice is that all the careful thought and study that have gone into the production of this Report are now only too likely to be largely discounted: the "bottom line" with which practical Americans are so to be concerned is that the Council is divided in its recommendations; its members were unable to reach agreement on the issue they were charged with studying. Hence the question remains open, and we are therefore essentially right back where the Senate's inaction left us, with unregulated human cloning looming upon the horizon.
The majority of the Council recommended that a four-year moratorium be imposed on all human cloning "by law." This means action by Congress. But it is hard to imagine Congress taking any further action at this point; stalled legislation, especially when the subject matter is controversial, is endemic to Congress.
It is true enough that perhaps many legislators, in order to quiet public anxiety, would like to be on the record with a vote "banning" human cloning, as the Feinstein bill claims to do. The Report of the Council on Bioethics itself unanimously found cloning-to-produce-children unethical (and in this regard may have unintentionally played into the hands of the Feinstein forces). In more than one place in the body of the Council's Report, however, there is language that indicates a clear recognition that such a prohibition of cloning-to-produce-children could really never be practical. It would be unenforceable; once cloning techniques became developed by further experimentation to the point where cloned embryos could be implanted, there would be no way to prevent that step. The only preventive measure at that point--if there were even a way to discover the fact of an implantation--would presumably be to force the woman to undergo abortion.
As both President Bush and the majority of the Council realize, human cloning must be stopped before it is started, if it is going to be stopped at all. Probably the majority of the Council erred in agreeing to a separate, unanimous recommendation to institute a ban that would really be no ban. In one of the Personal Statements appended to the Report, Gilbert C. Meilaender of Valparaiso University, who strongly opposes all human cloning, suggests that the majority only agreed to accept a distinction between cloning-to-produce-children and cloning-for-biomedical-research out of respect for the views of the Council members with whom they disagreed, and in order to allow the work of the Council to proceed. But since ultimate agreement was not going to prove possible, it might have been better to allow the fundamental disagreement to stand out more plainly.
MORAL CLARITY-- FOR GOOD OR ILL
On the other hand, the attempt to secure partial agreement perhaps saved the integrity of the Report, in the sense that the Report is accurate and truthful about what cloning is and what the implications of allowing it are. The Report does not descend into the untruths and obfuscation of a Senator Feinstein describing a human embryo as an "unfertilized egg," a Senator Hatch pretending that an embryo is not fully human until it is implanted in a woman, or a Tessa Wick being allowed to describe a human embryo as merely "a clump of cells." It clearly explains substitute terms for cloning such as "somatic cell nuclear transfer" (SCNT)--to which some scientists and cloning proponents have resorted, apparently in order to avoid the stigma of talking frankly about cloning.
It is true that in some of the Personal Statements some minority members slip into semantic evasions and fallacious argumentation, as when Daniel W. Foster of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School describes a human embryo "from the standpoint of science" as only "potentially human but biologically pre-human," or when Michael S. Gazzaniga of Dartmouth's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience suggests that the fact that we do not "grieve" or conduct funerals for dead embryos clinches the argument against their full humanity. (Does he really think that women who suffer miscarriages do not grieve?) A number of such semantic evasions and fallacious arguments are brilliantly answered in the Personal Statement of Robert P. George of Princeton (joined by Georgetown's Alfonso Gomez-Lobo), and faulty statements on human embryology are corrected by Stanford biology professor William B. Hurlbut.
What this means is that the minority of the Council--the members who favor cloning-for-biomedical-research--take their stand in the full knowledge that the entity being sacrificed is fully human. They believe that, ethically, we can kill this embryonic human being, for what we believe are larger purposes. This attitude is plainly and quite starkly stated in the part of the Report describing the minority position:
While we take seriously concerns about the treatment of nascent human life, we believe there are sound moral reasons for not regarding the embryo in its earliest stages as the moral equivalent of a human person. We believe the embryo has a developing and intermediate moral worth that commands our special respect, but that it is morally permissible to use early-stage cloned human embryos in important research under strict regulation.
We believe that concerns over the problem of deliberate creation of cloned embryos for use in research have merit, but when properly understood should not preclude cloning-for-biomedical research. These embryos would not be "created for destruction," but for use in the service of life and medicine. They would be destroyed in the service of a great good, and this should not be obscured.
The kind of "respect" exhibited here for the human embryo regarded as falling short of being "the moral equivalent of a human person" must inevitably remind us of such attitudes as that of the feminist Naomi Wolfe, who a few years back castigated her fellow radical feminists for not recognizing that aborted children were children. She herself had made the discovery that unborn children really were children, apparently, when she was pregnant. This did not mean, in her view, that women could not still proceed to exercise their "right to choose;" but it meant that feminists should at least be morally serious when the elimination of their unwanted babies was in question.
The minority viewpoint on the bioethics Council research must strike us the same way. To state that "special respect" is somehow being accorded to a human embryo that is created for the express purpose of being destroyed stretches the very concept behind the word "euphemism." The minority members are not deterred or turned back by the view of the Council majority that "to proceed we will effectively be endorsing the complete transformation of nascent human life into nothing more than a resource or a tool."
A BRIDGE ALREADY CROSSED?
How did we come to this pass? One answer to this question is suggested in the Personal Statements of two of those who favor approval of cloning-for-biomedical-research. And their answer amounts to a recognition that as a society we have already long since given away the principle that human beings are to be treated as ends and never as means.
Harvard Professor of Government Michael J. Sandel makes the pertinent point:
Those who oppose the creation of embryos for stem cell research but support research on embryos left over from in-vitro (IVF) clinics beg the question whether those IVF "spares" should have been created in the first place: if it is immoral to create and sacrifice embryos for the sake of curing or treating devastating diseases, why isn't it also objectionable to create and discard spare IVF embryos for the sake of treating infertility?
James Q. Wilson of UCLA makes a similar point. These points are not easy to dismiss. How can we credibly argue against creating cloned embryos for experimentation and subsequent destruction when as a society we are already allowing the creation of human embryos in IVF clinics, along with the subsequent destruction of those not implanted? In a number of places the Report of the Council on Bioethics touches upon the question of in-vitro fertilization, but the Report never draws the obvious parallels, as do Professors Sandel and Wilson. Nor is the Report itself at all critical of current IVF activities; on the contrary, it makes clear at more than one point its apparent acceptance of them. But this is inconsistent with the basic ethical position of the majority of the Council that embryos ought not to be created for utilitarian or instrumental purposes in order to be subsequently destroyed.
When he made his decision on August 9, 2001, to allow federal support for limited embryonic stem-cell research-the same speech in which he also revealed his belief that a human embryo was a human being in the full sense of the word-President Bush actually praised the work of the IVF clinics. According to him, the in-vitro fertilization available in them was a "process&which helps so many couples conceive children." Never mind that the methods employed by them involve the artificial creation of numerous embryos followed by the eventual intentional destruction of many, if not most, of them-exactly what the President in other contexts has called "morally wrong."
Yet there never seems to have been any criticism, or even any careful scrutiny, of the IVF industry in this country. There seem to be few complaints even about the outrageous fees that are customarily charged for IVF services. Generally the industry is considered to be eminently respectable. Genteel ads announcing "lectures" on the IVF process for infertile couples are a staple in the mainstream press and on classical music radio stations. The idea that anyone, especially any politician, might actually criticize them seems quite remote at the moment. But if it is the case--as the President said in his reaction to the claim of the Massachusetts ACT company that it had successfully cloned a human embryo--that "we should not as a society grow life to destroy it," then how have these IVF clinics been able to go on operating with scarcely a hint of public criticism? Why are there, for example, no pickets out in front of them as there are in front of abortion clinics?
DRAWING THE LINE
Which brings us to yet another important point, scarcely even alluded to in the Report of the Council on Bioethics, about why a ban on human cloning proved so difficult either for the Council itself, or for the US Senate, to accept. The objection to cloning is that it involves the exploitation of human embryos as mere objects, followed by the destruction, or killing, of them. Yet, since January 23, 1973, we as a society have been allowing the mass legal killing by abortion of an entire class of human beings, namely, children conceived in the womb but not yet born.
The question of legalized abortion has not prominently figured in the human cloning debate to date. Indeed, most pro-life opponents of cloning have tried hard to keep abortion out of the discussion. They believe the abortion issue can only complicate the fight against cloning, and in one sense they are undoubtedly correct; no one would like to sacrifice the vote of a "pro-choice" senator who still might happen to oppose cloning. Nevertheless, the underlying logic of the fact that, as a society, we are already condoning the killing of the unborn on a massive scale cannot but affect our thinking. How can we object to the cloning and subsequent destruction of embryos if we are already allowing the killing of human beings developed far beyond the embryonic stage
President Bush's eloquent address against human cloning in April, 2002, was surely both heartfelt and sincere; but it was too late. The time to fight the pro-experimentation forces with some chance of winning was back in the summer of 2001. The President should at that time have delivered a flat "No" to those agitating for embryonic stem-cell research (as he had promised during his campaign he would do). He would have had a terrific fight on his hands if he had done that, of course; but it was a fight he would have had a chance of winning at that point in time. The bioscience and biotech people were in disarray and fearful of a negative presidential decision; even President Clinton had not dared to approve the legitimacy of embryonic stem-cell research. More than that, the biotech lobby's present allies might never have enlisted in the cause, if the legitimacy of what was being done had not, in effect, been confirmed by the President himself when he allowed federal funding of even limited stem-cell research.
This whole sad history is a prime example of the fallacy of imagining that we can draw moral lines where we want them. This is a huge mistake; the moral lines are already there, in the nature of things; we merely have to discern them.
[AUTHOR ID] Kenneth D. Whitehead, a former Assistant Secretary of Education, follows the Washington scene from across the Potomac river in Falls Church, Virginia. He is the author, among other books, of Political Orphan: The Pro-life Movement after 25 Years of Roe v. Wade.
Because the US is not [yet] completely dominated by single issue religious nuts who want to force their views on everyone else, [but they are working hard at it].]
My sentiments also. Clone on.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.