Pro-Life Groups Prepare for Embryonic Stem Cell Research Battle This Week

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- When members of Congress return to Capitol Hill this week from their Memorial Day recess, they will renew their battle over a controversial bill that would make taxpayers fund embryonic stem cell research. Pro-Life groups are working overtime to keep the vote on the bill under the two-thirds needed to override a veto.

The House and Senate have already approve their respective versions of the bill and the House will vote on the Senate measure, S. 5, this week.

While the bill will undoubtedly pass, backers likely won't be able to get the two-thirds vote necessary to overturn a veto President Bush has already promised. In an effort to preemptively rebuke the President's veto, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is using the vote as a public relations stunt to showcase Congress's approval for the research.

An expected veto is good news to pro-life groups, that know taxpayers will likely be protected from being forced to pay for the destruction of human life for scientific research at least until after the 2008 presidential elections.

National Right to Life legislative director Douglas Johnson told LifeNews.com he expects the House to vote on the embryonic funding bill on Thursday. He said he believed the president will veto the bill and that the Senate, and possible the House, will take up an override vote later in the month.

"Please call the offices of your federal representatives today to register your opposition to S. 5," Johnson urged pro-life advocates to do in the next couple of days.

Meanwhile, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins says he thinks Congress is wasting its time promoting embryonic stem cell research when it is nowhere close to helping any patients. He said it should look to the use of adult stem cells instead.

"While Congress fritters away its time on science that has yielded little in the way of real treatments, the journal Cell Proliferation has published a study on adult stem cells extracted from the umbilical cords of newborns," he said.

As LifeNews.com has reported, those "adult" cells have been successfully engineered to produce insulin and could soon be used to treat diabetes patients.

"If Congress is going to spend our hard-earned money, I suggest they put it to better use and fund true progress like this," Perkins said.

ACTION: Contact your members of Congress and urge them to oppose the bill forcing people to pay for embryonic stem cell research and to vote against any attempt to override a presidential veto. You can call 202-224-3121 and connect with any legislator.

Another one that I received from Concerned Women for America thru my e-mail:

“Congresswoman Diana DeGette’s (D-Colorado) legislation will allow “research
cloning.” This despicable action involves the deliberate creation of a human embryo
for the sole purpose of destruction. We should not promote creating a second class
of humans for use as research guinea pigs. Under such legislation, it will be
perfectly acceptable to create, by cloning, any number of human embryos for use in
research that will kill them, but it would be unlawful to attempt to allow such a
human clone to live by implanting him or her in a womb.

Women’s eggs are REQUIRED for the process of cloning, and the extraction technique
exposes otherwise healthy women to the risk of infertility and even death. Research
cloning will lead to the exploitation of women — especially poor women in this
country and around the world.”

This is a news release from the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) in Washington, D.C., issued on Wednesday, June 6, 2007, at 6:45 PM EDT.
For further information, call 202-626-8820, send e-mail to Legfederal@aol.com, or follow the links below. Please forward this update to any appropriate lists.

U.S. House turns back stealth attempt by Democratic leadership to pass "clone-and-kill" bill

WASHINGTON (June 6, 2007) --
The U.S. House of Representatives today rejected a bill, deceptively labeled as a ban on human cloning, that actually would have allowed large-scale cloning of human embryos solely for purposes of research.

The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) condemned the measure as "a clone-and-kill bill," and strongly opposed it. After the vote, NRLC Legislative Director Douglas Johnson commented, "The House Democratic leadership tried to ram through a bill to pave the way for cloned human embryo farms, but their scam failed."

The White House issued a statement before the vote that said in part, "The Administration is strongly opposed to any legislation that would . . . permit the creation of cloned embryos or development of human embryo farms for research, which would require the destruction of nascent human life. Thus, if 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."

The vote on the bill, H.R. 2560, was 204 to 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 bill, H.R. 2560, was introduced by Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Co.) only Tuesday night, and brought to the House floor early the next day (today) under a procedure (called Suspension of the Rules) usually employed for noncontroversial matters. The language of the bill was not even available on the official congressional website when the measure was debated on the House floor. However, NRLC obtained the bill text late Tuesday, and warned House members in an e-mailed letter:
"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. 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."

To read the entire June 6 NRLC letter to U.S. House members, check the website.

NRLC's Douglas Johnson commented, "Any statement in any news story claiming that the bill would have banned 'cloning a human being' is false. 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."

NRLC supports the Weldon-Stupak Human Cloning Prohibition Act (H.R. 2564), which would prohibit the creation of human embryos by cloning nationwide. The House passed the bill in 2001 and 2003, but the Senate has never acted on it. The United Nations General Assembly in 2005 urged all member nations to enact such comprehensive bans on human cloning, and at least 23 nations have already done so, including Germany, France, and Canada.

For further information, go to the NRLC website page on human cloning at
http://www.nrlc.org/killing_embryos/index.html

The House will vote on June 7 on a separate bill, S. 5, that would mandate federal funding of the type of stem cell research that requires the killing of human embryos. President Bush has already said that he will veto that bill.

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