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NRL News
Page 28
April 2009
Volume 36
Issue 5

Pro-Human-Cloning Legislation in the Works, Lawmakers Admit

WASHINGTON (May 5, 2009)—Leading congressional advocates of using human embryos in research recently admitted that they are currently drafting legislation that would authorize the federal government to fund human cloning research.

In an interview with the publication CQ Today, published on April 27, 2009, Congresswoman Diana DeGette (D-Co.) acknowledged that a bill she is now drafting, in concert with Rep. Michael Castle (R-De.) and others, would authorize the federal National Institutes of Health (NIH) to fund research that would involve creating human embryos using “somatic cell nuclear transfer” (SCNT). SCNT is the laboratory technique that has been used to create thousands of cloned mammals without sperm, starting with the famed cloned sheep named Dolly in 1997.

“This statement is important, because DeGette and others who favor human cloning have been relying on stealth and misleading terminology to advance their agenda while they think the public is distracted by other issues,” commented NRLC Legislative Director Douglas Johnson. “They know that the public opposes the creation of human embryos by cloning.”

On March 9, President Obama issued an executive order that removed certain limits on federally funded human embryo research that had been adopted by President Bush in 2001. Obama said that he opposed “the use of cloning for human reproduction,” but pro-life commentators quickly pointed out that this was familiar code language employed by those who favor using cloning to create human embryos for research that will kill them (sometimes referred to by the misleading term “therapeutic cloning”), including research using the cloned embryos as a source of stem cells.

On April 17, NIH announced proposed guidelines for funding research projects using stem cells taken from human embryos who were created through in vitro fertilization (IVF), if donated by parents who no longer want to use the embryos to establish pregnancies. Federal funding of such projects was prohibited under the Bush policy.

The new NIH guidelines would not authorize NIH funding for research on human embryos who were deliberately created to be used in research, whether by IVF or by human cloning. Indeed, federal funding of the creation of human embryos for research, including cloned embryos, is currently prohibited by law.

It is these limitations that would be undermined by the anticipated new legislation. The legislation currently being drafted by DeGette and others will be more expansive than the NIH proposal. Among other things, the new bill would authorize NIH to engage in the creation and use of cloned human embryos.

DeGette “said that she does not seek to order the NIH to fund research based on therapeutic cloning. But she hopes to encourage it,” CQ Today reported. The article quoted DeGette as saying, “I hope the NIH will allow SCNT [human cloning] to move forward with federal funding. But if they don’t do that right now, what our bill will do is allow them to change that in the future if research shows it is a necessity and can be done ethically.”

In an April 17 statement, Castle, a Republican, made it clear that he was working in concert with DeGette on the expansive legislation: “I am pleased to see the NIH has moved quickly to draft the guidelines required by the executive order, however I believe there is opportunity for more expansive guidelines. Rep. DeGette and I have been working to develop legislative options to promote all ethical forms of stem cell research.”

CQ Today also reported, “DeGette says her legislation will contain language outlawing reproductive cloning.” This refers to language such as that contained in a DeGette bill that was opposed by NRLC and defeated in the House on June 6, 2007, which would have allowed the creation of human embryos by cloning but made it a federal offense to allow a human clone to survive—an approach denounced by NRLC and other pro-life groups as “clone and kill.”

“DeGette’s proposal is deceptively labeled, and a sham—it will not ban any human cloning at all,” said NRLC’s Johnson. “Rather, the bill will promote human cloning, and then try to punish anyone who allows a human clone to survive. This would be the first federal law that not merely allowed but actually required the snuffing out of an entire class of human beings embryos.”

So far, there has been no confirmed report of researchers successfully obtaining stem cells from cloned human embryos, but researchers in the U.S. and elsewhere are trying to do so.

In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly urged all member nations to ban the creation of human embryos by cloning, and dozens of countries have already done so, including Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, and Switzerland.

The CQ Today article confirmed the warnings issued by NRLC in a letter sent to federal lawmakers on March 31. NRLC’s letter alerted lawmakers to expect that the forthcoming stem cell research legislation would be broader than what many of them have been led to expect. (See “NRLC Warns U.S. House Members of ‘Bait-and-Switch’ on Stem Cell Research Bill,” April 2009 NRL News, back cover.)

The NRLC letter explained: “A legislative ‘bait and switch’ is in the works. We anticipate that the forthcoming ‘embryonic stem cell research’ legislation (1) will give NIH authority broad enough to fund research that uses not only ‘leftover’ human embryos but also created-for-research human embryos, including embryos created by human cloning; and (2) may be coupled with a clone-and-kill provision, which will be labeled as a ‘ban on human cloning’ but which will actually define ‘human cloning’ in a manner that allows the mass creation of human embryos by cloning, for the purpose of using them in research that will kill them.”

The NRLC letter concluded that in NRLC’s “scorecard” of key roll call votes in Congress, a vote for the forthcoming legislation “will be accurately described as a vote in favor of federal taxpayer support for human cloning and human embryo farms.”

The entire NRLC letter can be viewed on or downloaded from the NRLC web site at http://www.nrlc.org/Killing_Embryos/NRLCHousecloningwarning.pdf 

ACTION ITEM: To communicate with those who represent you in Congress on this issue, go to the NRLC Legislative Action Center at http://www.capwiz.com/nrlc/home/

You will find tools there that make it easy for you to send appropriate messages to your two U.S. senators and to your U.S. House member, at no cost, urging them to oppose any attempt to pass legislation that would allow federal funding of research that requires the creating and killing of human embryos, whether by human cloning or other methods.