1.This Act may be cited as the
Human Cloning Prohibition Act of
2009
.
2.Congress finds that—
(1)some individuals
have announced that they will attempt to clone human beings using the technique
known as somatic cell nuclear transfer already used with limited success in
sheep and other animals;
(2)nearly all
scientists agree that such attempts pose a massive risk of producing children
who are stillborn, unhealthy, or severely disabled, and considered opinion is
virtually unanimous that such attempts are therefore grossly irresponsible and
unethical;
(3)efforts to create
human beings by cloning mark a new and decisive step toward turning human
reproduction into a manufacturing process in which children are made in
laboratories to preordained specifications and, potentially, in multiple
copies;
(4)because it is an
asexual form of reproduction, cloning confounds the meaning of
father
and mother
and confuses the identity and
kinship relations of any cloned child, and thus threatens to weaken existing
notions regarding who bears which parental duties and responsibilities for
children;
(5)because cloning
requires no personal involvement by the person whose genetic material is used,
cloning could easily be used to reproduce living or deceased persons without
their consent;
(6)creating cloned
live-born human children (sometimes called reproductive cloning
)
necessarily begins by creating cloned human embryos, a process which some also
propose as a way to create embryos for research or as sources of cells and
tissues for possible treatment of other humans;
(7)the prospect of
creating new human life solely to be exploited and destroyed in this way has
been condemned on moral grounds by many, including supporters of a right to
abortion, as displaying a profound disrespect for life, and recent scientific
advances with adult stem cells indicate that there are fruitful and morally
unproblematic alternatives to this approach;
(8)in order to be
effective, a ban on human cloning must stop the cloning process at the
beginning because—
(A)cloning would take
place within the privacy of a doctor-patient relationship;
(B)the transfer of
embryos to begin a pregnancy is a simple procedure; and
(C)any Government
effort to prevent the transfer of an existing embryo, or to prevent birth once
the transfer has occurred, would raise substantial moral, legal, and practical
issues, so that it will be nearly impossible to prevent attempts at
reproductive cloning
once cloned human embryos are available in
the laboratory;
(9)the scientifically
and medically useful practices of cloning of DNA fragments, known as molecular
cloning, the duplication of somatic cells (or stem cells) in tissue culture,
known as cell cloning, and whole-organism or embryo cloning of nonhuman animals
are appropriate uses of medical technology;
(10)in the preamble
to the 1998 Additional Protocol on the Prohibition of Cloning Human Beings the
Council of Europe agreed that the instrumentalisation of human beings
through the deliberate creation of genetically identical human beings is
contrary to human dignity and thus constitutes a misuse of biology and
medicine
;
(11)collaborative
efforts to perform human cloning are conducted in ways that affect interstate
and even international commerce, and the legal status of cloning will have a
great impact on how biotechnology companies direct their resources for research
and development;
(12)at least 23 countries have banned all human
cloning, including Canada, France, and Germany;
(13)the United Nations has passed a declaration
calling for all human cloning to be banned by member nations; and
(14)attempts to create cloned human embryos for
development of embryonic stem cell lines have been unsuccessful, most recently
involving the exploitation of over a hundred women in South Korea to provide
over 2,000 human eggs without the production of a single stem cell line.
3.Prohibition on human
cloning
(a)Title 18, United States Code, is amended by inserting
after chapter 15, the following:
16
Sec.
301. Definitions.
302. Prohibition on human
cloning.
301.In this chapter:
(1)The term human cloning means human asexual
reproduction, accomplished by introducing the nuclear material of a human
somatic cell into a fertilized or unfertilized oocyte whose nucleus has been
removed or inactivated to produce a living organism (at any stage of
development) with a human or predominantly human genetic constitution.
(2)The term somatic cell means a diploid cell
(having a complete set of chromosomes) obtained or derived from a living or
deceased human body at any stage of development.
302.Prohibition on
human cloning
(a)It shall be unlawful for any person or entity, public or
private, in or affecting interstate commerce—
(1)to perform or
attempt to perform human cloning;
(2)to participate in
an attempt to perform human cloning; or
(3)to ship or receive
the product of human cloning for any purpose.
(b)It
shall be unlawful for any person or entity, public or private, to import the
product of human cloning for any purpose.
(c)
(1)Any person or entity that is convicted of violating any
provision of this section shall be fined under this section or imprisoned not
more than 10 years, or both.
(2)Any person or entity that is convicted of violating any
provision of this section shall be subject to, in the case of a violation that
involves the derivation of a pecuniary gain, a civil penalty of not less than
$1,000,000 and not more than an amount equal to the amount of the gross gain
multiplied by 2, if that amount is greater than $1,000,000.
(d)Nothing in this section shall restrict areas of
scientific research not specifically prohibited by this section, including
research in the use of nuclear transfer or other cloning techniques to produce
molecules, DNA, cells other than human embryos, tissues, organs, plants, or
animals other than
humans.
.
(b)The table of chapters for part I of title 18, United
States Code, is amended by inserting after the item relating to chapter 15 the
following:
16.Human
Cloning301
.