Setting a High Standard for Humanity

To Clone or Not to Clone

A clone is born! Cloned baby named Eve! More clones on the way!

These recent claims of a cloned baby by the Raelians are nothing more than pathetic cries for publicity from a group of alien-loving con-artists whose faces should be on the cover of tabloids not the New York Times. Though the ridiculously large amount of press coverage is a sad indication of where the profession of journalism is in our country, it did alert a large portion of the American public to the fact that human cloning is 100 percent legal in most of the U.S. Thankfully, Michigan, Iowa, and Virginia have banned human cloning. The alarm caused by the claim of clones has given the efforts to ban human cloning a boost of public support.

On January 8, 2003, Michigan’s own Bart Stupak, a prolife Democrat from Menominee, introduced the Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2003 (H.R. 234) with Dave Weldon, a prolife Republican from Florida.

Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2003 is virtually a carbon copy of the bill that Stupak and Weldon sponsored in 2001 and passed the House by a overwhelming bi-partisan vote of 265-162. Senate leadership, however, refused to bring this important legislation up for a fair handed vote.

Fortunately, the 2002 elections have changed the landscape of leadership in the Senate from those without respect for life to leaders who truly understand that human life is not a commodity.

During the State of the Union address on January 28, President George W. Bush called for Congress to pass a comprehensive ban on human cloning by saying, “And because no human life should be started or ended as the object of an experiment, I ask you to set a high standard for humanity and pass a law against all human cloning.”

And that’s what cloning is all about. Creating tiny cloned human beings and then destroying them for their stem cells. Treating human life like a piece of wood or steel to be created and grown to a specific size and then thrown away when it is no longer useful. Developing a whole group of humans whose sole purpose in life is to be sacrificed.

Hardly any sensible person could be in favor of the birth of a cloned child. Yet there are some who strongly favor creating cloned human embryos and then extracting their stem cells (which kills the embryo). This process is known as “therapeutic” cloning or cloning for biomedical research. Proponents of this experimental research claim that millions of lives will be saved even though they have yet to show that they have even removed stem cells from a cloned human embryo or proven that these stem cells could actually help people.

Some will also bypass the fact that hundreds of millions and possibly billions of human eggs would be needed to cure millions. Removing eggs from women is an expensive and somewhat dangerous procedure.

Where are these eggs going to come from? How are millions of people going to be able to afford this expensive, complicated, and unproven treatment? Shouldn’t this money be used for non-controversial research with adult stem cells that is already proven successful? These are all questions that those in favor of cloning for biomedical research have refused to answer.

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