"Justice Requires No Less"

Alas, it is the nature of a monthly such as National Right to Life News that very often a timely development takes place a day or two after publication. Such was the case July 10 when the President's Council on Bioethics issued its first report, "Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry."

As its inestimable chairman Leon Kass wrote in his letter to President George W. Bush, "The product of six months of discussion, research, reflection, and deliberation, we hope that it will prove a worthy contribution to public understanding of this momentous question" of human cloning. The report is seriously flawed, but that is to be expected when a President does not handpick a totally one-sided panel whose only objective is to reach a preordained result.

Unlike some previous high-octane panels - - say, the one that explored the question of whether the federal government ought to subsidize the harvesting of fetal brain tissue for transplantation - - the President's Council is comprised of people with varying points of view. In the short run this meant some recommendations were excellent while others were surely not. In the long run, however, being scrupulously fair always pays off.

So where, from our point of view, did the 18-member panel err? The greatest shortcoming is surely that the report did not call for a permanent ban on all human cloning. Instead it unfortunately limited such a ban to what it accurately labeled " cloning to produce children" (typically more vaguely described as " reproductive cloning"). By contrast, it recommended only a four-year moratorium on " cloning for biomedical research," again a vast improvement at least in specificity to nonsense such as "therapeutic cloning."

NRLC pointed out in response, "We strongly favor a permanent ban on all human cloning, such as the House has passed and President Bush supports. However, we could support legislation to temporarily ban human cloning, but such a moratorium should apply equally to human cloning for any purpose"--cloning to produce children and cloning for biomedical research.

Is there support within the American public for just such an all- encompassing prohibition? Indeed there is. There are large majorities that strongly disapprove of cloning to produce children. And when informed that cloning for biomedical research requires the death of human embryos, a majority gives a thumbs down to that as well.

Finally, the longer we keep this beast at bay, the more time there will be for the public to absorb that there already exist ethically unobjectionable sources that may well pave the way to finding cures for major illnesses and diseases.

To reiterate, the much more accurate description of the two forms of cloning provided by the President's Council on Bioethics will lead to a better understanding of what is at stake. Likewise, a moratorium would detour the biotechnology industry's determined effort to steamroll Congress and the public. However, there are also two other enormously positive side effects.

The likes of Senators Feinstein, Specter, Hatch, Daschle, and others are pushing for legislation that would authorize the cloning of human embryos up through 14 days. Believe it or not, the legislation would assign to the FBI the responsibility for enforcing the deadline - - that is, for assuring that these human embryos are killed!

Any senator who votes for this clone-and-kill bill would be directly repudiating the Council's majority recommendation, which, as noted above, is to ban all cloning of human embryos for at least four years.

But Feinstein is not content to guarantee that human clones are disposed of promptly. She is telling us, in one of the most blatantly disingenuous campaigns of disinformation in memory, that as long as the developing human being that is cloned is killed prior to 15 days, we shouldn't be upset because these are not members of the human species anyway but merely "unfertilized eggs." If that doesn't make you double-clutch, worse yet she asserts that such an "unfertilized egg is not capable of becoming a human being."

But does that make any sense? Of course not! Dolly the sheep followed the same developmental path. In Feinstein's vocabulary, Dolly started out as the same "unfertilized egg," then was implanted in her mother's uterus and brought to term.

Evidently by a unanimous vote, the Presidential Council repudiated these rhetorical shenanigans.

Unambiguously, the Council declares that somatic cell nuclear transfer using human genetic material is indeed "human cloning," and indeed produces not "unfertilized eggs" but a "human embryo."

Nothing I could say could compare in scope, expertise, and wisdom to the personal statement of Council member Professor Robert George, who was joined by Dr. Alfonzo Gómez-Lobo, found in the report's appendix. (By the way, SCNT - - somatic cell nuclear transfer - - refers to transferring the nucleus of a donor cell into a human ovum whose own nucleus has been removed to produce a cloned embryo.) They write,

"In conclusion, we submit that law and public policy should proceed on the basis of full moral respect for human beings irrespective of age, size, stage of development, or condition of dependency. Justice requires no less. In the context of the debate over cloning, it requires, in our opinion, a ban on the production of embryos, whether by SCNT or other processes, for research that harms them or results in their destruction. Embryonic human beings, no less than human beings at other developmental stages, should be treated as subjects of moral respect and human rights, not as objects that may be damaged or destroyed for the benefit of others."

dave andrusko can be reached at dha1245@juno.com