Posted on 11/19/2004 9:12:33 AM PST by Former Military Chick
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - A U.S.-led campaign to ban cloning of human embryos, including for stem cell research, crumbled on Friday as a divided United Nations prepared to abandon the initiative.
"The bottom line is that stem cell research will advance. This declaration will not chill stem cell research," said Bernard Siegel, a Florida attorney who led a lobbying drive by scientists and patient advocacy groups to defend cloning for therapeutic ends.
In an agreement reached late on Thursday, backers and foes of the three-year drive by the Bush administration agreed to ask the U.N. General Assembly's treaty-writing legal committee to drop its consideration of a treaty on the issue.
Opponents of the U.S. plan said the agreement showed that a majority of the 191 U.N. member-nations wanted to keep the door open to therapeutic cloning, in which human embryos are cloned as part of research such as stem cell studies.
But Ambassador Bruno Stagno Ugarte of Costa Rica, who led nations supporting Washington's plan, said it would have won in a straight up-or-down vote but instead faced death through procedural challenges, as happened twice before in the panel.
"We are concentrating on what we perceive to offer the best chance for prompt U.N. action on an urgent and important issue," he told Reuters.
Friday's committee action fell a little over two weeks after U.S. elections in which stem cell research was an issue.
Opinion polls showed strong support for such studies, and the U.S. Congress has so far shunned President Bush's pleas for a tough law that bans therapeutic cloning.
But Bush has on his own restricted the use of federal money for stem cell research, allowing U.S. funding only for studies on embryonic stem cell batches that existed as of August 2001.
BOTTLED UP SINCE 2001
France and Germany first proposed a U.N. treaty banning human cloning in 2001, but the issue has been bottled up ever since over whether a treaty should also ban the cloning of human embryos, as Washington insisted.
The United States says this is the taking of human life.
But many nations fought to exclude therapeutic cloning from the ban. Scientists say the technique holds out the hope of a cure for some 100 million people with such conditions as Alzheimer's, cancer, diabetes and spinal cord injury.
Under the agreement reached Thursday, the legal committee was poised to adopt a resolution instructing a working group to meet in February for talks on a political declaration proposed by Italy as a face-saving compromise.
Rome proposed the assembly issue a nonbinding statement calling on nations to adopt laws "to prohibit any attempts to create human life through cloning processes and any research intended to achieve that aim."
While proponents of embryonic stem cell studies had problems with the term "human life," they agreed the text could form the basis of future negotiations, diplomats said.
IMO a case of "the Best being the enemy of the Good" – the anti-cloning side could have had a ban on reproductive cloning, went for broke, and lost.
Now, looks like even a ban on RC won’t be back on the international agenda fro several years.
Although the President is seen as a strong leader, if he really wanted to get his point across he would simply stop paying dues to the UN. But unlike Reagan, who did cut off US funds for many years, I honestly don't think Bush has the nerve. Even if he wanted to do it, the neocons with whom he has surrounded himself, would talk him out of it.
On top of pro-abort Alberto Gonzales becoming AG, this is a sad development.
Larry Niven, the SF writer, had a series of books set in his own future history, where science had progressed to the point a heart transplant was like a muffler job...in and out same day with little rejection...the same kind of thing for arms, legs, kidneys. The sheer demand caused the government to set up "organ banks" fed by the dis-assembly of capital criminals. (This idea actually might have some merit, but the ACLU would howl, so it will have to wait until after we gut them.) So a murderer got to repay his crime by supplying a heart, twelve quarts of blood, two kidneys, etc. However, people being people, before long the aging population were voting the death penalty for tax evasion, check kiting, jay walking...
What a Brave New World that has such people in it!
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