[This is the text of a letter sent by NRLC to
members of the U.S. Senate on February 5, 1998, as the Senate began consideration
of proposed legislation to restrict the practice of human cloning.]
Dear Senator:
As the Senate takes up the Bond/Frist/Gregg bill (S. 1601) to ban the cloning
of human beings, the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) urges you to
reject the substitute amendment that we anticipate will be offered by Senators
Kennedy and Feinstein, which would codify a policy that creation of cloned
humans is permitted so long as those human beings are killed.
If the life of any human being is begun through the process of somatic
cell nuclear transfer - - wisely or unwisely, legally or illegally - - then
that human being must be recognized as a human being. Thus, NRLC is strongly
opposed to the Kennedy-Feinstein proposal (which was introduced as S. 1602),
which makes it a crime not to create a cloned human being, but rather
"to implant or attempt to implant the product of somatic cell nuclear
transfer [i.e., the living human embryo] into a woman's womb,"
or to ship embryos "for the purpose" of such implantation.
Enactment of Kennedy-Feinstein would amount to a declaration by Congress
that living human embryos are something other than human beings. Under the
Kennedy-Feinstein proposal, it would be perfectly legal to create cloned
human embryos and use them as subjects for harmful experimentation, so long
as they are killed before being implanted in a woman's womb. Under the Kennedy-Feinstein
proposal, if it is learned that a "researcher" plans to actually
implant living human embryos into women's wombs, federal authorities must
step in to ensure that every embryo dies. If illegal implantations
do occur, the federal government will punish the researchers (and conceivably
the women involved) for failing to kill the embryos.
For these reasons, the NRLC urges you to vote against the Kennedy-Feinstein
proposal. NRLC intends to report the roll call on the Kennedy-Feinstein
substitute in our "scorecard" of key right-to-life votes for the
105th Congress, as a vote on whether to legitimate the use of cloned human
embryos as subjects for harmful experimentation, and to mandate that these
human embryos must be killed after being used for such experimentation.
Thank you for considering our position on this critical right-to-life issue.
Sincerely,
Douglas Johnson
NRLC Legislative Director