[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 111 (Thursday, August 2, 2001)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1509-E1510]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 HUMAN CLONING PROHIBITION ACT OF 2001

                                 ______
                                 

                               speech of

                           HON. PETE SESSIONS

                                of texas

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, July 31, 2001

  Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. Speaker, I would like to submit the article 
entitled, ``Cloning's Big Test'' for the Record.

                 [From the New Republic, Aug. 6, 2001]

                           Cloning's Big Test

                 (By Leon R. Kass and Daniel Callahan)

       Everyone has been arguing for weeks about whether President 
     Bush should authorize funding for research on human embryonic 
     stem cells. But few have noticed the much more momentous 
     decision now before us: whether to permit the cloning of 
     human beings. At issue in the first debate is the morality of 
     using and destroying human embryos. At issue in the second is 
     the morality of designing human children.
       The day of human cloning is near. Reputable physicians have 
     announced plans to produce a cloned child within the year. 
     One biotech company (Advanced Cell Technology) just announced 
     its intention to start producing embryonic human clones for 
     research purposes. Recognizing the urgent need for action, 
     Congress is considering legislation that would ban human 
     cloning. Last Tuesday the House Judiciary Committee approved 
     a tough anti-cloning bill, H.R. 2505, the Human Cloning 
     prohibition Act of 2001. Introduced by Republican Dave Weldon 
     of Florida and Democrat Bart Stupak of Michigan, and co-
     sponsored by more than 120

[[Page E1510]]

     members from both parties, the bill is scheduled for a vote 
     on the House floor as early as this week. But the House is 
     also considering a much weaker ``compromise`` bill that would 
     ban reproductive cloning but permit cloning for research. It 
     is terribly important that the former, and not the latter, 
     passes. First, because cloning is unethical, both in itself 
     and in what it surely leads to. Second, because the Weldon-
     Stupak bill offers our best-indeed, our only--hope of 
     preventing it from happening.
       The vast majority of Americans object to human cloning. And 
     they object on multiple grounds: It constitutes unethical 
     experimentation on the child-to-be, subjecting him or her to 
     enormous risks of bodily and developmental abnormalities. It 
     threatens individuality, deliberately saddling the clone with 
     a genotype that has already lived and to whose previous life 
     its life will always be compared. It confuses identity by 
     denying the clone two biological parents and by making it 
     both twin and offspring of its older copy. Cloning also 
     represents a giant step toward turning procreation into 
     manufacture; it is the harbinger of much grizzlier eugenic 
     manipulations to come. Permitting human cloning means 
     condoning a despotic principle: that we are entitled to 
     design the genetic makeup of our children (see ``Preventing a 
     Brave New World,'' by Leon R. Kass, TNR, May 21).
       So how do we stop it? The biotech industry proposes banning 
     only so-called reproductive cloning by prohibiting the 
     transfer of a cloned embryo to a woman to initiate a 
     pregnancy. But this approach will fail. The only way to 
     effectively ban reproductive cloning is to stop the process 
     from the beginning, at the stage where the human somatic cell 
     nucleus is introduced into the egg to produce the embryo 
     clone. That is, to effectively ban any cloning, we need to 
     ban all human cloning.
       Here is why: Once cloned embryos exist, it will be 
     virtually impossible to control what is done with them. 
     Created in commercial laboratories, hidden from public view, 
     stockpiles of cloned
       Worst of all, a ban only on reproductive cloning will be 
     unenforceable. Should the illegal practice be detected, 
     governmental attempts to enforce the ban would run into a 
     swarm of practical and legal challenges. Should an ``illicit 
     clonal pregnancy'' be discovered, no government agency is 
     going to compel a woman to abort the clone, and there would 
     be understandable outrage were she fined or jailed before or 
     after she gave birth. For all these reasons, the only 
     practically effective and legally sound approach is to block 
     human cloning at the start--at producing the embryonic clone.
       The Weldon-Stupak bill does exactly that. It precisely and 
     narrowly describes the specific deed that it outlaws (human 
     somatic cell nuclear transfer to an egg). It requires no 
     difficult determinations of the perpetrator's intent or 
     knowledge. It introduces substantial criminal and monetary 
     penalties, which will deter renegade doctors or scientists as 
     well as clients who would bear cloned children. Carefully 
     drafted and limited in scope, the bill makes very clear that 
     there is to be no interference with the scientifically and 
     medically useful practices of animal cloning or the equally 
     valuable cloning of human DNA fragments, the duplication of 
     somatic cells, or stem cells in tissue culture. And the bill 
     steers clear of the current stem-cell debate, limiting 
     neither research with embryonic stem cells derived from non-
     cloned embryos nor even the creation of research embryos by 
     ordinary in vitro fertilization. If enacted, the law would 
     bring the United States into line with many other nations.
       Unfortunately, the House is also considering the biotech 
     industry's favored alternative: H.R. 2608, introduced by 
     Republican Jim Greenwood of Pennsylvania and Democrat Peter 
     Deutsch of Florida. It explicitly permits the creation of 
     cloned embryos for research while attempting to ban only 
     reproductive cloning. But that's not something it is likely 
     to achieve. It licenses companies to manufacture embryo 
     clones, as long as they say they won't use them to initiate a 
     pregnancy or ship them knowing that they will be so used. It 
     therefore guarantees that there will be clonal embryo-farming 
     and trafficking in clones, with many opportunities for 
     reproductive efforts unintended by their original makers. And 
     the bill's proposed ban on initiating pregnancy is, as 
     already argued, virtually impossible to enforce.
       There are further difficulties. The acts the Greenwood-
     Deutsch bill bans turn largely on intent and knowledge--hard 
     matters to discern and verify. The confidentiality of the 
     called-for Food and Drug Administration registration of 
     embryos-cloning means that the public will remain in the dark 
     about who is producing the embryo clones, where they are 
     bought and sold, and who is doing what with them. A provision 
     preempting state law would make it impossible for any state 
     to enact any other--and more restrictive--legislation. A 
     sunset clause dissolving the prohibition after ten years 
     would leave us with no ban at all, not even on reproductive 
     cloning. Most radically, the bill would create two highly 
     disturbing innovations in federal law: It would license for 
     the first time the creation of living human embryos solely 
     for research purposes, and it would make it a felony not to 
     ultimately exploit and destroy them. The Greenwood-Deutsch 
     legislation reads less like the Cloning Prohibition Act of 
     2001 and more like the ``Human Embryo Cloning Registration 
     and Industry Protection Act of 2001.''
       It is possible that embryo-cloning will someday yield 
     tissues derivable for each person from his own embryonic twin 
     clone, tissues useful for the treatment of degenerative 
     disease. But the misleading term ``therapeutic cloning'' 
     obscures the fact that the research clone will be ``treated'' 
     only to exploitation and destruction and that any future 
     ``therapies'' are, at this point, purely hypothetical. 
     Besides, we have promising alternatives--not only in adult 
     stem cells but also in non-cloned embryonic stem-cell lines--
     that do not open the door to human clonal reproduction. 
     Happily, these alternatives will not require commodifying 
     women's ovaries in order to provide the vast number of eggs 
     that would be needed to give each of us our own twin embryo 
     when we need regenerative tissue. Should these alternatives 
     fail, or should animal-cloning experiments someday 
     demonstrate the unique therapeutic potential of stem cells 
     derived from embryo clones, Congress could later revisit and 
     lift the ban.
       The Weldon-Stupak bill has drawn wide support across the 
     political spectrum; feminist health writer Judy Norsigian and 
     liberal embryologist Stuart Newman joined Catholic spokesman 
     Richard Doerflinger and political theorist Francis Fukuyama 
     in testifying in its favor. Health and Human Services 
     Secretary Tommy Thompson, a proponent of research with 
     embryonic stem cells, has endorsed it. Thoughtful people 
     understand that human cloning is not about pro-life versus 
     pro-choice. Neither is it a matter of right versus left. It 
     is only and emphatically about baby design and manufacture, 
     the opening skirmish of a long battle against eugenics and 
     the post-human future. Once embryonic clones are produced in 
     laboratories, the eugenic revolution will have begun. Our 
     best chance to stop it may be on the House floor next week.

     

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