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NRL News
U.S.
House Turns Back Stealth Attempt by WASHINGTON—The U.S. House of Representatives rejected a bill that would have allowed large-scale cloning of human embryos solely for purposes of research. H.R. 2560 had been deceptively packaged as a “ban” on human cloning. The June 6 vote was 204-213 — short of a majority, and 74 votes short of the two-thirds majority that was required for approval under the fast-track procedure that the House Democratic leadership used to try to rush the bill through less than a day after its introduction. (The House roll call appears on pages 22-23 of this issue.) NRLC strongly condemned what it described as a “clone-and-kill” bill. “The House Democratic leadership tried to ram through a bill to pave the way for cloned human embryo farms, but their scam failed,” said NRLC Legislative Director Douglas Johnson. NRLC supports the Weldon-Stupak Human Cloning Prohibition Act (H.R. 2564), which would prohibit the creation of human embryos by cloning nationwide. While the House passed the bill in 2001 and 2003, the Senate has never acted on it. In 2005 the United Nations General Assembly urged all member nations to enact such comprehensive bans on human cloning. At least 23 nations have already done so, including Germany, France, and Canada. Introduced by Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Co.), H.R. 2560 was brought to the House floor under a procedure usually employed for non-controversial matters. However NRLC warned House members in a letter sent by e-mail and fax: “While H.R. 2560 is titled ‘The Human Cloning Prohibition Act’ . . . in reality, H.R. 2560 does not ban any human cloning at all. H.R. 2560 would allow — indeed, it is carefully constructed to encourage — the creation of any number of cloned human embryos. The letter continued, ”H.R. 2560 would allow development of these cloned human embryos (individual members, male or female, of the species Homo sapiens) in the laboratory, perhaps even for weeks, so that they can be killed in order to harvest their stem cells or used in other research that will kill them — a practice opposed by about 75% of the public.” NRLC’s Johnson cautioned reporters not to be taken in by the way the bill was labeled, “Any statement in any news story claiming that the bill would have banned ‘cloning a human being’ is false,” he said. “Successful use of the cloning process called ‘somatic cell nuclear transfer’ (the same cloning process that created Dolly the sheep and thousands of other mammalian clones), utilizing human genetic material, will produce an embryo of the species Homo sapiens, which biologically is a human being. “A journalist who asserts that this bill ‘bans the cloning of a human being,’ when the bill clearly permits the mass creation of human embryos by cloning, has embraced the position that a human embryo is not a human being — which is, to say the least, taking one side’s position on a hotly disputed subject.” Before the vote was taken, the White House issued a statement that said in part, “[I]f legislation were presented to the President that permitted human embryos to be created, developed, and destroyed simply for research purposes, his senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill.” |