NJ CLONE AND KILL LEGISLATION RELEASED FROM ASSEMBLY HEALTH COMMITTEE
ASSEMBLY VOTE COULD OCCUR AS EARLY AS MONDAY, FEB. 10, 2003. IMMEDIATE ACTION NEEDED!!!
Prepared by Marie Tasy
Director of Public & Legislative Affairs
New Jersey Right to Life www.njrtl.org
On February 3, 2003, The Assembly Health Committee released A2840/S1909 out of committee on a party line vote with six Democrats voting for the bill and two abstaining. The Committee heard 4 hours of testimony from witnesses, an overwhelming majority of whom were opposed to the legislation. The testimony was transcribed and will be available at a later date through the NJ Legislature’s webpage.
NJRTL provided copies of a legal opinion addressed to NJRTL from Professor Gerard Bradley, et al. to Committee members as well as a letter written to Governor Jim McGreevey from four members of the President’s Council on Bioethics outlining some grave problems with the legislation. After the committee was made aware that the bill would allow therapeutic cloning, forced abortions, reproductive cloning, and the commercial trafficking in baby body parts, the committee released the bill over the objections of NJRTL who asked that the bill not be released from committee, but rather held for further discussion. Assemblywoman Loretta Weinberg, FR Links to Loretta Weinberg's Legislation the Chair of the Committee indicated that the sponsor would review the bill, and, possibly add amendments on the floor when the bill comes up for a vote before the full Assembly. The Senate bill was merged with the Assembly bill, which means they are now identical.
The bill can come up for a vote as early as Monday, February 10, 2003.
Action needed:
Continue to contact your two Assembly members and urge them to vote “NO” on A2840/S1909 and “NO” on any amendments that may be offered.
See below article which reports on today’s hearing:
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Assembly panel approves stem cell bill The Associated Press TRENTON, N.J. (AP) -- A bill that would authorize stem cell research continued to raise objections from religious and anti-abortion groups Monday as it moved a step closer to becoming law. After four hours of testimony, an Assembly committee approved the bill, praising it as a cutting edge tool that will allow research on cells to find cures for diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis. But groups such as New Jersey Right to Life and New Jersey Catholic Conference argued the bill would permit cloning of humans and the trafficking of human body parts. "We believe it is more important than ever to stand for the principle that government must not treat any living human being as research material as a mere means for benefit to others," according to a statement from New Jersey's Catholic bishops. The bill must now go before the full Assembly, and the legislation already has passed the Senate. Gov. James E. McGreevey also said he supports stem cell research and urged lawmakers to pass the bill, saying it provides hope for those suffering from incurable illnesses. If the bill becomes law, New Jersey would become the second state in the nation to allow stem cell research. The law would require a doctor treating patients for infertility to provide enough information for them to make an educated choice regarding use of human embryos after infertility treatments. Most stem cell researchers get unwanted embryos donated by fertility clinics. Stem cells are created in the first days of pregnancy and give rise to the human body. Scientists hope to someday direct stem cells to grow into replacement organs and tissues to treat a wide range of diseases. To harvest stem cells, researchers must destroy days-old embryos -- a procedure condemned by the Roman Catholic Church, anti-abortion activists and others. Some were outraged that lawmakers advanced the bill. "If this legislation passes, Raelians will feel perfectly comfortable calling New Jersey home and setting up their laboratories," said Marie Tasy, director of public and legislative affairs for New Jersey Right to Life. In December, Clonaid, a group started by a religious sect called the Raelians, claimed to have produced the first human clone. But the group, which believes life on Earth was started by extraterrestrials, has failed to produce the child for independent DNA testing. |
NY Times
WASHINGTON - The failure of the last Congress to enact a ban on human cloning casts grave doubt on our ability to govern the unethical uses of biotechnology, even when it threatens things we hold dear. The new Congress must work to break the legislative impasse.
Opposition to cloning to produce children is practically unanimous in America: The vast majority of Americans oppose it. Most research scientists agree that it should be banned. Nearly every member of Congress has condemned it.
Cloning not only carries high risks of bodily harm to the cloned child, but it also threatens the dignity of human procreation, giving one generation unprecedented genetic control over the next. It is the first step toward a eugenic world in which children become objects of manipulation and products of will.
Yet legislation that would have banned cloning failed to pass the Senate last year. Partisans on both sides of the cloning debate sought to entangle it with the larger debate about stem cell and embryo research. Disentangling the two debates is the key to passing responsible legislation that would prohibit this practice in the United States.
We first need to be clear about the facts. All human cloning begins with the same act: the production of a cloned human embryo. Cloning to produce children would involve the implantation of such embryos in a woman's body and their development to birth; cloning for biomedical research, in contrast, involves the dissection of these embryos to obtain stem cells (and, someday perhaps, the harvesting of fetal tissues and organs).
The political controversy is whether both or only the first of these uses of cloning should be prohibited - and whether, as a practical and moral matter, it is possible to stop cloning to produce children while allowing cloning for research.
The debate so far has been inadequate and wrongly focused. Supporters of cloning for research have often tried to confuse the issue by euphemistic distortion - claiming that the production of cloned embryos is not really cloning, that the embryos produced are not really embryos at all. At
the same time, they have falsely characterized a ban on cloning for research as a ban on all embryo and stem cell research.
Opponents of cloning research, meanwhile, have been preoccupied with putting a stop to the destruction of embryos and so have failed to focus on what is unique about all human cloning: the expanded power to manipulate nascent
human life and thus to master the very technique that will make cloning to produce children possible. Were this danger better understood, opposition to the practice would mount.
It is true that cloning research offers hope, however speculative, for understanding and treating disease. Yet we should not deceive ourselves about the value and necessity of such research: there is virtually no precedent in animal work that demonstrates the unique benefits of creating and exploiting cloned embryos; we have only just begun to understand existing embryonic stem cells; and promising results with adult stem cells, if confirmed, may obviate altogether the putative need for cloned stem cells.
It is also true that the ethics of embryo research is relevant to the cloning debate. Cloning research would require the routine production of embryos solely as a source for experimentation. It would require large numbers of human eggs and invite the exploitation of egg donors. And legislation that allowed creating cloned embryos for research while criminalizing their implantation to create cloned children would mandate, by law, the destruction of nascent human life.
The central issue in the cloning debate, however, and the primary reason to support a ban or moratorium on all human cloning, is this: it threatens the dignity of human procreation. Concern about this threat should lead us to oppose all cloning, including cloning for research.
Human cloning must be seen in the context of our growing powers over human reproduction augmented by new knowledge of the human genome. Science already permits us to screen
human embryos in vitro for thousands of human genes. These include not only those that have markers for dread diseases, but also soon genes responsible for other human traits: not just sex, height or skin color but even intelligence, temperament or sexual orientation.
Genetic selection of embryos is today a growing industry. Some experts hail assisted reproduction as the route to genetically sound babies. While directed genetic change of human embryos (even for therapeutic purposes) may be a long way off, it has been accomplished in primates in the
laboratory. It would be naïve to believe that cloning children will be confined to infertile couples and that cloning research will be confined to studies of disease. Viewed in this larger context, the production of cloned embryos for any purpose is a significant leap in transforming procreation into a form of manufacture. The embryo created by cloning would be the first human embryo to have its genetic identity selected in advance, the first embryo whose makeup is not the unpredictable result of uniting sperm and egg. It is precisely this genetic control that makes cloned embryos appealing and useful.
But we should not be deceived: saying yes to cloned embryos, even for research, means saying yes, at least in principle, to an ever-expanding genetic mastery of one generation over the next. Once cloned human embryos exist in laboratories, the eugenic revolution will have begun.
It is these concerns that have caused many countries to prohibit all human cloning, both for reproduction and research. Germany, Italy, France, Norway, Australia and other democracies, many of which support embryo research, have said no to this practice. The European Parliament,
hardly an arm of the religious right, has also called for the prohibition of all human cloning.
Our country should do the same. The United States should prohibit all human cloning, regardless of its aim - or, at the very least, ban it for several years.
Such a policy would allow time to consider the real significance of crossing this crucial moral boundary. It would allow time for other areas of stem cell research, both adult and embryonic, to proceed. It would provide the most effective safeguard against the production of cloned children by stopping cloning before it starts. And it would allow the national debate to continue. If we do nothing now, human cloning will happen here, and we will have acquiesced in its arrival. It is time for
Congress to act.
Leon R. Kass, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/24/opinion/24KASS.html?ex=1044420617&ei=1&en=51f1ff162bcc0743