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February 12, 2003
WASHINGTON –
The Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives today approved
legislation to prohibit the creation of human embryos by cloning in the United
States. Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) announced that the full House
will take up the issue the week of February 24. Douglas Johnson, legislative
director for the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), applauded the
committee vote as "a step towards preventing cloned human embryo farms from
opening for business."
The Judiciary Committee approved, 19-12, the Weldon-Stupak Human Cloning
Prohibition Act (H.R. 534). The bill is nearly identical to legislation
approved by the House on July 31, 2001, but never acted on by the Senate. It is
very similar to the current Brownback-Landrieu bill in the Senate (S. 245).
These bills are supported by President Bush, who in his January 28 State of the
Union address repeated his past calls for Congress to approve legislation to ban
all human cloning. The President warned in an April 10, 2002 speech that
without such a law, human "embryo farms" may begin operation in the United
States. (The President's speech is here:
www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/04/print/20020410-4.html)
The Judiciary Committee rejected amendments that would have permitted human
embryos to be created by cloning and allowed to develop for days or weeks to
harvest their stem cells or for other research purposes. However, on the House
floor, opponents of H.R. 534 are expected to offer a competing proposal (a
"substitute amendment") similar to the Hatch-Feinstein bill (S. 303). Such a
substitute was offered in 2001 by Congressman Jim Greenwood (R-PA.), and was
rejected. NRLC's Johnson said that the approach taken in the Hatch-Feinstein
and Greenwood proposals, to permit human cloning for research, "would give a
green light to growing human embryos to be harvested for their parts." Bush
Administration officials have repeatedly warned that legislation to permit human
cloning for research would be subject to a veto.
Many press reports in recent weeks have misunderstood how the competing bills
really differ. In reality, neither side's bill would restrict research on human
ova ("eggs"), and both allow the use of cloning methods to produce human DNA,
cells, or tissues. The real difference is this: The Weldon-Stupak and
Brownback-Landrieu bills ban the creation of human embryos by cloning, while the
Hatch-Feinstein and Greenwood proposals would allow human embryos to be created
by cloning.
NRLC's Johnson said some journalists and editorial writers recently have shown
"remarkable gullibility" in reporting that the Hatch-Feinstein bill "prohibits
any [cloning] research on an egg cell after 14 days," and similar absurdities.
Johnson commented, "Any middle school science student knows that a human ovum or
'egg' is a single cell, with only 23 chromosomes and no sex. It is biological
nonsense to apply the term 'egg' to a five-day-old or two-week-old developing
cloned embryo, which has 46 chromosomes and is male or female. And it is doubly
silly to report that a bill would ban cloning except on 'unfertilized eggs,'
since cloning by definition is reproduction without sexual fertilization. All
clones, animal or human, are €˜unfertilized' no matter how long they live."
NRLC has released a fact sheet that explains what the competing bills would
actually allow and what they would forbid, at www.nrlc.org, or in PDF at
www.nrlc.org/Killing_Embryos/Cloningmediabackgrounder.pdf |
