How sick!
NJ CLONE AND KILL LEGISLATION RELEASED FROM ASSEMBLY HEALTH COMMITTEE
ASSEMBLY VOTE COULD OCCUR AS EARLY AS MONDAY, FEB. 10, 2003. IMMEDIATE ACTION NEEDED!!!
Prepared by Marie Tasy
Director of Public & Legislative Affairs
New Jersey Right to Life www.njrtl.org
On February 3, 2003, The Assembly Health Committee released A2840/S1909 out of committee on a party line vote with six Democrats voting for the bill and two abstaining. The Committee heard 4 hours of testimony from witnesses, an overwhelming majority of whom were opposed to the legislation. The testimony was transcribed and will be available at a later date through the NJ Legislature’s webpage.
NJRTL provided copies of a legal opinion addressed to NJRTL from Professor Gerard Bradley, et al. to Committee members as well as a letter written to Governor Jim McGreevey from four members of the President’s Council on Bioethics outlining some grave problems with the legislation. After the committee was made aware that the bill would allow therapeutic cloning, forced abortions, reproductive cloning, and the commercial trafficking in baby body parts, the committee released the bill over the objections of NJRTL who asked that the bill not be released from committee, but rather held for further discussion. Assemblywoman Loretta Weinberg, FR Links to Loretta Weinberg's Legislation the Chair of the Committee indicated that the sponsor would review the bill, and, possibly add amendments on the floor when the bill comes up for a vote before the full Assembly. The Senate bill was merged with the Assembly bill, which means they are now identical.
The bill can come up for a vote as early as Monday, February 10, 2003.
Action needed:
Continue to contact your two Assembly members and urge them to vote “NO” on A2840/S1909 and “NO” on any amendments that may be offered.
See below article which reports on today’s hearing:
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Assembly panel approves stem cell bill The Associated Press TRENTON, N.J. (AP) -- A bill that would authorize stem cell research continued to raise objections from religious and anti-abortion groups Monday as it moved a step closer to becoming law. After four hours of testimony, an Assembly committee approved the bill, praising it as a cutting edge tool that will allow research on cells to find cures for diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis. But groups such as New Jersey Right to Life and New Jersey Catholic Conference argued the bill would permit cloning of humans and the trafficking of human body parts. "We believe it is more important than ever to stand for the principle that government must not treat any living human being as research material as a mere means for benefit to others," according to a statement from New Jersey's Catholic bishops. The bill must now go before the full Assembly, and the legislation already has passed the Senate. Gov. James E. McGreevey also said he supports stem cell research and urged lawmakers to pass the bill, saying it provides hope for those suffering from incurable illnesses. If the bill becomes law, New Jersey would become the second state in the nation to allow stem cell research. The law would require a doctor treating patients for infertility to provide enough information for them to make an educated choice regarding use of human embryos after infertility treatments. Most stem cell researchers get unwanted embryos donated by fertility clinics. Stem cells are created in the first days of pregnancy and give rise to the human body. Scientists hope to someday direct stem cells to grow into replacement organs and tissues to treat a wide range of diseases. To harvest stem cells, researchers must destroy days-old embryos -- a procedure condemned by the Roman Catholic Church, anti-abortion activists and others. Some were outraged that lawmakers advanced the bill. "If this legislation passes, Raelians will feel perfectly comfortable calling New Jersey home and setting up their laboratories," said Marie Tasy, director of public and legislative affairs for New Jersey Right to Life. In December, Clonaid, a group started by a religious sect called the Raelians, claimed to have produced the first human clone. But the group, which believes life on Earth was started by extraterrestrials, has failed to produce the child for independent DNA testing. |
NY Times
WASHINGTON - The failure of the last Congress to enact a ban on human cloning casts grave doubt on our ability to govern the unethical uses of biotechnology, even when it threatens things we hold dear. The new Congress must work to break the legislative impasse.
Opposition to cloning to produce children is practically unanimous in America: The vast majority of Americans oppose it. Most research scientists agree that it should be banned. Nearly every member of Congress has condemned it.
Cloning not only carries high risks of bodily harm to the cloned child, but it also threatens the dignity of human procreation, giving one generation unprecedented genetic control over the next. It is the first step toward a eugenic world in which children become objects of manipulation and products of will.
Yet legislation that would have banned cloning failed to pass the Senate last year. Partisans on both sides of the cloning debate sought to entangle it with the larger debate about stem cell and embryo research. Disentangling the two debates is the key to passing responsible legislation that would prohibit this practice in the United States.
We first need to be clear about the facts. All human cloning begins with the same act: the production of a cloned human embryo. Cloning to produce children would involve the implantation of such embryos in a woman's body and their development to birth; cloning for biomedical research, in contrast, involves the dissection of these embryos to obtain stem cells (and, someday perhaps, the harvesting of fetal tissues and organs).
The political controversy is whether both or only the first of these uses of cloning should be prohibited - and whether, as a practical and moral matter, it is possible to stop cloning to produce children while allowing cloning for research.
The debate so far has been inadequate and wrongly focused. Supporters of cloning for research have often tried to confuse the issue by euphemistic distortion - claiming that the production of cloned embryos is not really cloning, that the embryos produced are not really embryos at all. At
the same time, they have falsely characterized a ban on cloning for research as a ban on all embryo and stem cell research.
Opponents of cloning research, meanwhile, have been preoccupied with putting a stop to the destruction of embryos and so have failed to focus on what is unique about all human cloning: the expanded power to manipulate nascent
human life and thus to master the very technique that will make cloning to produce children possible. Were this danger better understood, opposition to the practice would mount.
It is true that cloning research offers hope, however speculative, for understanding and treating disease. Yet we should not deceive ourselves about the value and necessity of such research: there is virtually no precedent in animal work that demonstrates the unique benefits of creating and exploiting cloned embryos; we have only just begun to understand existing embryonic stem cells; and promising results with adult stem cells, if confirmed, may obviate altogether the putative need for cloned stem cells.
It is also true that the ethics of embryo research is relevant to the cloning debate. Cloning research would require the routine production of embryos solely as a source for experimentation. It would require large numbers of human eggs and invite the exploitation of egg donors. And legislation that allowed creating cloned embryos for research while criminalizing their implantation to create cloned children would mandate, by law, the destruction of nascent human life.
The central issue in the cloning debate, however, and the primary reason to support a ban or moratorium on all human cloning, is this: it threatens the dignity of human procreation. Concern about this threat should lead us to oppose all cloning, including cloning for research.
Human cloning must be seen in the context of our growing powers over human reproduction augmented by new knowledge of the human genome. Science already permits us to screen
human embryos in vitro for thousands of human genes. These include not only those that have markers for dread diseases, but also soon genes responsible for other human traits: not just sex, height or skin color but even intelligence, temperament or sexual orientation.
Genetic selection of embryos is today a growing industry. Some experts hail assisted reproduction as the route to genetically sound babies. While directed genetic change of human embryos (even for therapeutic purposes) may be a long way off, it has been accomplished in primates in the
laboratory. It would be naïve to believe that cloning children will be confined to infertile couples and that cloning research will be confined to studies of disease. Viewed in this larger context, the production of cloned embryos for any purpose is a significant leap in transforming procreation into a form of manufacture. The embryo created by cloning would be the first human embryo to have its genetic identity selected in advance, the first embryo whose makeup is not the unpredictable result of uniting sperm and egg. It is precisely this genetic control that makes cloned embryos appealing and useful.
But we should not be deceived: saying yes to cloned embryos, even for research, means saying yes, at least in principle, to an ever-expanding genetic mastery of one generation over the next. Once cloned human embryos exist in laboratories, the eugenic revolution will have begun.
It is these concerns that have caused many countries to prohibit all human cloning, both for reproduction and research. Germany, Italy, France, Norway, Australia and other democracies, many of which support embryo research, have said no to this practice. The European Parliament,
hardly an arm of the religious right, has also called for the prohibition of all human cloning.
Our country should do the same. The United States should prohibit all human cloning, regardless of its aim - or, at the very least, ban it for several years.
Such a policy would allow time to consider the real significance of crossing this crucial moral boundary. It would allow time for other areas of stem cell research, both adult and embryonic, to proceed. It would provide the most effective safeguard against the production of cloned children by stopping cloning before it starts. And it would allow the national debate to continue. If we do nothing now, human cloning will happen here, and we will have acquiesced in its arrival. It is time for
Congress to act.
Leon R. Kass, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/24/opinion/24KASS.html?ex=1044420617&ei=1&en=51f1ff162bcc0743
Growing tension between powerful forces over whether to enact a ban on all human cloning boils down to two ways of considering the status of the human embryo. There are those like President Bush and the vast majority of Americans who believe that a human embryo is a human being created by God in His image, through the sexual union of the male sperm and female egg. Others, represented in Congress by Senators Arlen Specter (R-PA), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Ted Kennedy D-MA), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and others, plus the pharmaceutical and biotech industries and many scientific groups who support human cloning and embryonic stem cell research, consider the human embryo engendered through assisted or a-sexual reproduction, to be a man-made object to be used and ultimately killed in scientific experiments.
In his State of the Union address on January 28, 2003, President Bush said, “Because no human life should be started or ended as the object of an experiment, I ask you to set a high standard for humanity, and pass a law against all human cloning.” The Weldon/Stupak Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2003 to ban human cloning (H.R. 234) which passed the House in July 2001 and was stopped in the Senate by Sen. Tom Daschle (D-SD), has been reintroduced in the House with 103 co-sponsors. Last week, the Brownback/Landrieu bill (S. 245), identical to the House version, was reintroduced in the Senate with 21 co-sponsors. In contrast, Senators Specter, Hatch, Feinstein and Kennedy have introduced a competing “clone and kill” bill (S. 303), which would allow the cloning of human embryos for experimentation, provided they are killed prior to 14 days of life. Their bill would result in the immoral and unethical establishment of what President Bush called “human embryo farms.”
In an opinion poll conducted by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) on his web site, the vast majority of respondents said they support a total ban on human embryo cloning. 92% support the Brownback-Weldon ban and 84% wish to ban the Specter-Hatch-Kennedy plan. The fact that Senator Frist did a poll on an issue so fundamental has led some to speculate that his support for a total ban may be conditional, especially in light of his previously stated endorsement of human embryonic stem cell research. The question arises: Does Senator Frist consider the human embryo to have an inviolable moral status?
David Freddoso, in the 1/13/03 edition of Human Events pointed out that, according to the Dec. 24, 2002 Boston Globe, Senator Frist “met recently with officials from Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) – a Massachusetts-based research company that has already cloned human embryos.” The meeting was, according to the Globe, arranged by wealthy ACT investors “friendly with Frist,” who were worried that the company’s cloning work would soon be outlawed.”
Mr. Fredosso’s report mentions the fact that last March, Frist expressed discomfort with a provision in the Weldon and Brownback bills that forbade importation into the United States of therapies produced from human clones. Senator Brownback (R-KS) argued at that time that such a provision was necessary in order to prevent an easy end-run around the law, a reasonable assumption for someone who wants a cloning ban to stick.
However, the prohibition is missing from the new cloning ban bills, S. 245 and H.R. 234. Its absence raises the concern that even if a ban were to be enacted, the U.S. biotech industry might still profit from the manufacture of human clones off-shore and the importation and sale of “products” made from them. The importation provision should be restored to the bills immediately in order to discourage off-shore cloning efforts.
In August of 2001, President Bush failed to stop stem cell experimentation on human embryos, instead allowing research to continue on cell lines derived from human embryos who had already been killed in privately funded research laboratories. At the same time, he formed The President’s Council on Bioethics and appointed Dr. Leon Kass, M.D., Ph.D, a University of Chicago professor, as its chairman. Reportedly, it was Dr. Kass who advised the president to allow embryonic stem cell research to continue, albeit in a limited way.
Linda K. Bevington, MA, Director of Research at The Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, described a meeting she had with Dr. Kass and fellow bioethicist Dr. Kevin FitzGerald, Ph.D, S.J. in an article published in the Winter 2001 issue of Dignity. She pointed out that Dr. Kass “stated in his Congressional testimony on June 20, 2001 that, “Anyone truly serious about preventing human reproductive cloning must seek to stop the process from the beginning, at the stage where the human somatic cell nucleus is introduced into the egg.” In answer to her questions, Ms. Bevington says that, “Kass defended the necessity of a comprehensive ban by asserting that it would be the only ban that would effectively prevent ‘reproductive’ human cloning.” He also “asserted that a comprehensive cloning ban would place the burden of proof on cloning advocates to offer a convincing argument as to why we should endorse something that would transform humanity.”
In October of 2002 at the American Enterprise Institute Book Forum featuring “Human Cloning and Human Dignity,” the report on human cloning by The President’s Council on Bioethics, Diana Schaub, associate professor of political science at Loyola College in Maryland and a participant in the forum made the following statement: “Cloning is an evil; and cloning for the purpose of research actually exacerbates the evil by countenancing the willful destruction of nascent human life. Moreover, it proposes doing this on a mass scale, as an institutionalized and routinized undertaking to extract medical benefits for those who have greater power. It is slavery plus abortion.”
Dr. Kass, in his remarks, made this troubling comment: “Yes, new lives would be created, and on a mass scale, purely to serve other people’s purposes. And, yes, such innocent, nascent lives would be willfully exploited and destroyed. But, I am not sufficiently confident about the ontological or moral status of a five-day-old embryo to speak in such abolitionist terms.”
Today, even though the President and the vast majority of Americans demanding a ban on human cloning, Dr. Kass along with the majority on The President’s Council on Bioethics, is supporting a total ban on so-called “reproductive” cloning but only a four-year moratorium on “cloning for biomedical research.” This is unacceptable. All cloning is “reproductive.” And it must be banned.
Many European countries have already banned human cloning. On February 3, 2003, the French Senate passed a comprehensive ban on human cloning as a “crime against the human species” and imposes a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison for transgressors. It now goes to the Assembly and could become law by the end of June.
The United States must act, and quickly! The state of New Jersey is poised to enact a law allowing the cloning of human embryos and their implantation as long as they are killed for bio-medical research prior to the “newborn” stage! Stanford University announced in December that an anonymous donor had provided $12 million to establish a center devoted entirely to the study of human cloning and stem cell research. California Governor Gray Davis recently signed a bill that encourages scientists to pursue methods that “generate” embryonic stem cells. (Washington Update, 12/13/02)
The cloning ban bills with the importation prohibition restored should be passed and signed by the President without delay! Please convey that message to your representatives in Congress. 202-224-3121.