Taking Orwellian Liberties With Ordinary Language

On those occasions when I sit down to try to figure out what motivates our benighted opposition, honestly, I really try my best to extend them the benefit of the doubt. Not only does that help keep me intellectually from becoming slovenly, we are indeed foolhardy if we too readily dismiss arguments that many people find persuasive.

But the truth is that since so much of what they say is sheer sophistry, we can dispense with the idea they actually believe what they say except on rare occasions. What other explanation might there be for their behavior?

Perhaps they've persuaded themselves that their cause is so right - - it "liberates women," etc., etc. - - that they're comfortable spinning what they might call webs of "noble lies" (the "ends justify the means" sort of rationalization).

However, there is an area where I simply no longer can give them even the slightest benefit of the doubt. And that is human cloning.

What you'll read in the stories on pages 17 and 34 is nothing short of cozying up to infanticide in the guise of "banning reproductive cloning." If measures such as those proposed in New York and New Jersey were ever to pass, ethically, we would've crossed the Rubicon with the most frightful consequences.

The good news is that North Dakota and Arkansas have enacted genuine bans on all human cloning. The bad news is that the stake has not yet been driven through the heart of these awful cloning bills in New Jersey and New York.

The trick to decoding what's in these bills is to be able to unveil the real meaning cloaked in layers of duplicitous language. About 99.9% of us would assume that what's meant by banning "reproductive cloning" is that the human clone will not be implanted in a woman's uterus and brought to term. (We, of course, vigorously oppose creating a human clone to experiment on who is killed and tossed away like so much refuse.)

It's not entirely clear what proponents in New Jersey and New York are up to. But what is not in dispute is that the language of the bill's requires that the child not be allowed to live beyond the "new born" stage (New Jersey) or past "birth" (New York)!

As NRLC State Legislative Director Mary Spaulding Balch said after reading the bills repeatedly, "The only conclusion I could reach is that they have taken absolutely Orwellian liberties with ordinary language."

My experience is that when you actually confront anti-life forces with the obvious implications of their proposals, they look at you as if you are crazy. Their "You don't actually believe it would come to that, do you?" responses, however, exist in a total vacuum. What they're asking us to do is act as if the past two or three years never took place. Consider....

Cloning proposals have morphed from terrible to grotesque with a speed that is unmatched in my 25 years of involvement in these issues. Alas, this is going largely unnoticed even in the states that are debating these increasingly awful proposals. All this as a series of phony "compromises" is bogging down the United States Senate's attempt to ban all human cloning. Look at the recent chronology. About an hour and a half ago, they figuratively put an arm around our shoulders and told us that all they wanted were a few stem cells harvested from embryos "left over" at fertility clinics. Those who would give their lives for science were killed so early they barely had time to divide more than a few times, we were reassured. Just a "clump of cells."

Before you could say, "Hey, watch out for that slippery slope," the ante was raised. They told us there were problems with ordinary stem cells, so why not clone the human embryos and circumvent such nagging problems as tissue rejection?

Along the way, they promised us repeatedly they'd never, never, never allow that new human being to continue growing past, say, day 14. For after all, we were told, while we don't all agree about so-called "therapeutic cloning," we do agree we shouldn't clone a child for birth (so-called "reproductive cloning").

This, of course, only made matters worse: first you clone and then you enlist the legal authorities to be sure the newly created human life is killed! But that was then and this is now. They've raced past that barrier with barely a glance back at the damage strewn all over the highway.

If you didn't understand their real agenda, it would amaze you to know that in the very same time frame there were a series of amazing studies that documented the great promise of sources other than human embryonic tissue - - cloned or otherwise - - in addressing a whole host of medical problems. However, no matter how extraordinary the results, they'd always come in a distant second when matched up against the utopian promises made if human embryonic stem cells were harvested.

To be sure, cloning proponents continue to keep digging for positive results from cloning to try to offset the great news from non-human fetal sources. But as Richard Doerflinger writes on page 34, there are only two studies that show "therapeutic" benefits from cloning. Doerflinger, deputy director of the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, explains:

"One, published in Nature Biotechnology last July, involved efforts to supply new kidney tissue to cows. But it required taking the cloned cow embryos to the fetal stage and aborting them for their stem cells. The authors... said: 'Because cloned cells were derived from early-stage fetuses, this approach is not an example of therapeutic cloning and would not be undertaken in humans.'

"The other study appeared in the journal Cell last April. This time, researchers found they had to use cloning and genetic engineering to produce a newborn mouse and harvest its adult stem cells to treat the original mouse's immune deficiency."

What's going on here? In Doerflinger's words,

"They're broadening their agenda, so cloned humans can be developed past the embryonic stage for use as organ farms. In at least eight states this year, scientists and biotechnology companies are promoting legislation to advance 'research involving the derivation and use of human embryonic stem cells, human embryonic germ cells, and human adult stem cells from any source, including somatic cell nuclear transplantation.'"

What do these words mean? We truly need to know, for their implications are almost unbelievably scary.

We know something about human embryonic stem cells, but "embryonic germ cells"? They are derived from unborn babies at around eight weeks of development.

Dolly, the famous sheep, was created by the "somatic cell nuclear transplantation" cloning procedure. And "adult stem cells"? They are obtained from born human beings!

"So what does this language mean?" Doerflinger asks.

"It means the cloning debate is not just about embryos anymore....Now we are debating whether a laboratory procedure should be used to produce an entire class of human beings whose only destiny (at every stage of development) is to be exploited for cells that others may find useful."

There is the aforementioned good legislation that passed in North Dakota and Arkansas which bans all human cloning. We can hope that members of the United States Senate will take their cue from these positive developments.

But if that isn't sufficient motivation, we can only hope and pray they are watching the Brave New World that cloning proponents are quietly trying to create underneath the radar.

dave andrusko can be reached at dadandrusk@aol.com