[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 82 (Thursday, June 12, 1997)]
[House]
[Page H3724]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




             CLONING BAN VERSUS PARTIAL BIRTH ABORTION BAN

  (Mr. GUTKNECHT asked and was given permission to address the House 
for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. GUTKNECHT. Mr. Speaker, this afternoon the Subcommittee on 
Technology will conduct a hearing to review the President's National 
Bioethics Advisory Commission Report on Cloning.
  When the President accepted the Commission's report and announced 
legislation to ban the use of cloning technology to create human beings 
last Monday, he stated the following, and I quote:

       Our scientific explorations must be guided by our 
     commitment to human values, to the good of society, to our 
     basic sense of right and wrong. Nothing makes the necessity 
     of that moral obligation more clear than the troubling 
     possibility that these new animal-cloning techniques could be 
     used to create a child. Attempting to create a human being is 
     unacceptably dangerous to the child and morally unacceptable 
     to our society. Creating a child through this new method 
     calls into question our most fundamental beliefs. It has the 
     potential to threaten the sacred family bonds at the very 
     core of our ideals and our society.

  Mr. Speaker, I commend the President on his remarks, and I intend to 
support the Cloning Prohibition Act. But how is it, Mr. Speaker, that 
our President can ban a technique to create a human life but veto 
legislation banning the grisly procedure known as partial birth 
abortion?

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