Congressional Record, Volume 149 Issue 30 (Tuesday, February 25, 2003)

[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 30 (Tuesday, February 25, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H1307-H1311]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

HUMAN CLONING PROHIBITION ACT OF 2003

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Weldon) is recognized
for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to address the
House regarding the very important issue of human cloning.
The question before our Nation is are we going to allow human cloning
in the United States of America or are we going to ban human cloning?
In the 107th Congress, I introduced legislation, the Human Cloning
Prohibition Act of 2001. This legislation ultimately was reviewed and
passed approvingly after hearings by the Committee on the Judiciary and
was brought to the floor of the House and received a favorable vote in
the House of Representatives passing by a margin of 265 for, 162
against.
Of note in that vote there were some 63 Democrats who voted in
support of this legislation to ban all forms of human cloning. And I
would point out that many of the Democrats who voted in support of
banning human cloning were pro-choice.
There are many people who have tried to define this debate about
human cloning as liberal/conservative. They have tried to define it as
a pro-life/pro-abortion rights kind of debate; but in reality the
debate on human cloning transcends some of those traditional divisions
that separate the political parties and factions within the House of
Representatives and within our Nation.
Unfortunately, the legislation to ban all forms of human cloning that
passed overwhelmingly in the House of Representatives 2 years ago,
almost 2 years ago now, it was never taken up by the Senate. The Senate
never held a vote on the issue. Therefore, the issue was essentially
left open; and, indeed, many Americans are shocked and surprised to
learn today that there is no law on the books in the United States of
America to ban human cloning. Indeed, many foreign countries have
already moved, they have already acted to ban human cloning. Several
European countries have banned it outright, like Germany, for example.
Norway has banned it completely. The European Parliament has called for
a complete ban on human cloning. The French Senate very recently voted
to ban all forms of human cloning. So clearly there is a tide sweeping
the globe that says, no, we are not going to move away from human pro-
creation to baby manufacturing, which is really what this debate is all
about in its essence.
Due to the failure of the Senate, or the other body, to act on this
issue, I reintroduced my legislation along with my colleague from
Michigan (Mr. Stupak). Our bill is H.R. 534, the Human Cloning
Prohibition Act of 2003. And I would like to talk a little bit about
what the legislation is and what it does, and I have a few visuals to
help with this debate.
First of all, I would like to start out with what is human cloning.
In normal sexual reproduction, the sperm and the egg unite to form a
single-cell embryo, and that single-cell embryo rapidly begins a
process of dividing to form this multicell embryo. And, of course, from
there it develops further into the fetal stage of development forming a
baby and ultimately a human being like you and I.
In human cloning we have a procedure called somatic cell nuclear
transfer, and what happens here is you take a human egg and you either
deactivate the nucleus in the egg or you remove it, and there are two
different approaches to that. And you essentially end up with an egg
that has no nuclear material in it. In a normal human egg, the normal
cells in our bodies have 46 chromosomes; but in the egg there are 23
chromosomes and in the sperm there are 23, and they come together to
form a new unique human being with 46 chromosomes.
So in the process of cloning, you either deactivate this nucleus or
you eject it out. So you end up with an enucleated egg. And then you
take a cell from somebody's body, and in this depiction this has the
appearance of a skin cell and you extract the nucleus out of that cell,
and you place it inside the egg. And this is why it is called nuclear
transfer. It is called somatic cell nuclear transfer because the cells
in our bodies are called somatic cells or body cells. Somatic means
body. And then what happens next is typically they zap this egg with a
little bit of electricity, and lo and behold it begins to divide and
form an embryo.
This, of course, is the first mammal that was ever cloned. The first
species that was cloned, I believe, it occurred in the 1950s. It was a
carrot. But this creation of Dolly the sheep was the first example of a
mammal being cloned. Prior to cloning Dolly, there had been some other
vertebrates that were cloned, but Dolly was the first mammal. And, of
course, we as humans are mammals. And the reason this created so much
news is because Dolly a sheep, a mammal very similar to us, and what
they did there was they took an udder, cell which is essentially a
mammary duct cell, and they took the nucleus out of it from the donor
sheep, and then they took another sheep and they took an egg from that
sheep and removed the nucleus. And so they did the nuclear transfer
technology, and so they had the DNA of this sheep in the egg from this
sheep. They zapped it with electricity. They got it to grow in culture,
and then they transplanted it into another female sheep. And this is,
of course, the surrogate mother and Dolly was created.
And here is Dolly depicted here. This sheep is a genetic duplicate of
this sheep, the one that you took the nucleus out of. This sheep can be
construed as the twin or this one can be construed as the twin of this
sheep.
Now, it is worth noting that Dolly was born on July 5, 1996. Almost
immediately Dolly began to show signs of premature aging. Indeed, the
researchers who have studied all the cloned mammals that have been
cloned so far, pigs, goats, mice, they all show genetic defects in all
of them.
Dolly manifested early arthritis; and, of course, she had to be
euthanized, or put to sleep, recently because of the development of
further medical conditions. She essentially experienced half the normal
life expectancy of a normal sheep. And this is one of the principle
issues why many people feel that to do cloning in humans, as some
people are proposing, is morally and ethically reprehensible.
It took 237 attempts to create Dolly with many miscarriages, many
sheep being born with very, very severe birth defects. So if we try to
do this with humans, the question, of course, becomes how many humans
will be born, how many babies will be born with birth defects? How will
we take care of them? Who will be responsible for them?

[[Page H1308]]

{time} 2000

One of the most disturbing things about all this is if we were able
to overcome those immediate birth-related problems, what would the life
of a person who was cloned be like? Would they manifest premature
aging? Would they ultimately succumb to diseases at an early age? This
is clearly experimentation of the absolute worst and most reprehensible
kind, and there is general agreement that we should outlaw cloning
specifically of this type, referred to as reproductive cloning.
What this House will engage in a tremendous amount of debate on over
the next few days is the issue of whether or not we should allow
something called therapeutic cloning or the creation of cloned embryos
in the lab. I anticipate that there will be a substitute for my
legislation being offered by the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr.
Greenwood). His legislation contends that it is best to simply outlaw
the creation of a human being but to allow the unfettered creation of
human embryos in the lab to be exploited for research purposes because
of the supposed great potential of these to lead to cures to many
diseases.
I know there are a lot of people who have some questions about this
issue, and I would be very happy to yield to the gentleman from Arizona
(Mr. Renzi), a distinguished freshman from the Flagstaff area. I
understand he had some questions for me about this issue.
Mr. RENZI. Mr. Speaker, I would like to engage the gentleman from
Florida in a colloquy if he would not mind, please.
Mr. WELDON of Florida. I would be happy to do that.
Mr. RENZI. Mr. Speaker, I have seen and heard a lot of rhetoric, and
recently we had a letter that was sent around by one of our colleagues
that favors the research, if we can call it that, on behalf of the
Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research. And I have got some
serious questions and doubts as to the truth.
One of our colleagues says that their position is reasonable, and his
letter goes on to state that somatic cell nuclear transfer is not the
science fiction you see in movies but, rather, a reasonable and
appropriate way to alleviate the horror faced by patients suffering
from deadly and painful disease. Pain and disease is something that all
Americans are passionate about, and I would ask my colleague, then,
what cures, in light of this great new technology, have occurred using
somatic cell nuclear transfer, if he does not mind.
Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I would be happy to respond to
his question. This is a very, very important issue, and it gets
essentially to the crux of the debate we are going to have here on the
floor of this body on Thursday when H.R. 534 comes up for discussion,
debate, and consideration and vote, and I want to just point out one
very very important thing about this.
They are trying to call embryo cloning somatic cell nuclear transfer,
and the reason they are trying to do that, scientifically that is what
it is, but the overwhelming majority of Americans are opposed to all
forms of human cloning. It is something like 65, 70, 80 percent of the
American people are against all forms of human cloning, and so they are
trying to put a pretty face on it so they are calling it somatic cell
nuclear transfer.
The important point I want to raise I think was stated very nicely by
the President's National Bioethics Advisory Commission back in 1997,
and they said the commission began its discussion fully recognizing
that any efforts in humans to transfer a somatic cell nucleus into an
enucleated egg involves the creation of an embryo with the apparent
potential to be planted in utero and developed to term.
So what they are saying here is this is cloning. So they may want to
call it somatic cell nuclear transfer but it is definitely cloning.
They go on to say this is not science fiction you see in movies, but
rather a reasonable and appropriate way to alleviate the horrors faced
by patients suffering from deadly painful diseases. This kind of
language in my opinion is reprehensible. There is no basis in science
to make a claim like this, and I have been saying this over and over
again. I would be very, very happy to debate these people who go around
making these claims.
Therapeutic cloning has never been done. It is going to be debated
here as though it is a scientific fact. It is a scientific fiction. It
has never been demonstrated in humans. What is more, it has never even
been demonstrated in an animal model. We purchase from research labs
these animals that are genetically programmed to develop diabetes. We
cannot take this technology and use it to even cure an animal. The
advocates for embryo cloning do not have even one, one, example of
where in an animal model they can cure disease; and for them to go so
far as to say this has the potential to alleviate the horrors faced by
patients suffering from deadly diseases, I think it is a horror that
they would make such a grossly exaggerated and false statement, because
it raises the false hopes of millions of Americans who suffer from
these diseases. There is no scientific evidence that this has the
potential to be effective at this time.
I apologize, this is a very, very long answer to the gentleman's
question. But my legislation to ban cloning does not prohibit animal
cloning, and it does not prohibit animal embryo cloning, and so the
advocates for this will have unfettered ability to demonstrate that
this works in animal models, and if they can demonstrate that it works
in animal models, they can come back to the Congress and say we really
feel very strongly that you need to allow this to move forward in human
models, the Congress has the ability to reverse the law. But that is a
grossly exaggerated claim.
I understand the gentleman wanted to ask me some more questions in a
colloquy.
Mr. RENZI. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
Mr. WELDON of Florida. I yield to the gentleman from Arizona.
Mr. RENZI. Mr. Speaker, I take it then from the gentleman's answer
that we have no proof that any cures to human beings, never mind even
animals, exist; and by the chart the gentleman showed, it actually
accelerates the aging of an animal and actually leads to faster death,
then. So rather than cure life, it leads to a faster death.
Could I respond also to a portion of the gentleman's statement as it
relates to some of the break-throughs that have been claimed, and could
I ask that the gentleman look at a piece from a letter that was also
recently sent around, and I quote: Cloning is widely used. It is widely
used. It is a vital medical tool that has allowed scientists and
researchers to develop powerful new drugs, produce insulin, useful
bacteria in the lab, track the origins of biological weapons, catch
criminals, and free innocent people. It even produces new plants and
livestock to help feed and nourish the poor of our world.
In addition to wanting to alleviate pain and suffering, I consider
myself a compassionate American who wants to help save our world, and
it sounds like cloning is going to do just that. The gentleman's bill,
of course, would not ban this type of cloning that was going to save
our world, would it?
Mr. WELDON of Florida. This is a very confusing quote because it
really mixes two issues. It starts out saying cloning is a widely used,
vital medical tool that has allowed scientists and researchers to
develop powerful new drugs. What they are talking about is we have been
cloning tissues in the labs for years, we have been cloning animals in
the labs for years, we have been cloning DNA in the lab, and some of
these cloning technologies are finding their way into the research and
development arenas that are used for development of new drugs, produce
insulin, useful bacteria in the lab. And so those statements are true.
But my bill does not ban those things. This group, CAMR, or the
Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research, they are against my
bill; but in that response they fail to point out that my bill does not
ban all of that animal cloning and all of that DNA cloning, all that
stuff that is going on.
What it specifically only bans is human cloning, an attempt to create
a human embryo in the lab, and they seem to imply in the first sentence
of that quote the gentleman just read that it is a vital medical tool.
Those applications that would be permissible under my legislation are
certainly vital, and they will proceed unfettered,

[[Page H1309]]

but human cloning is not a vital medical tool. There is not one
research article where human cloning has been used to treat anybody of
anything.
Might I also add, the crux of this debate is the whole issue of
regenerative medicine and if a person gets sick, the traditional tools
used by physicians are surgery and medications to make a person well;
and of course there is therapy and there are lots of other modalities
to make people well. But an additional tool is this concept of
regenerative medicine where we take cells and put cells in a person's
body and those cells make a person better, and adults themselves have
actually been used in 45 human clinical trials to make people well.
Embryonic stem cells have never been used in a single clinical trial
to ever make anybody well. Embryo stem cells have never been used in an
animal model to heal an animal. There have been a couple of studies
that seem to suggest that embryo stem cells might have some potential
at some point in the future, but they do not have a model where we can
take an animal with disease and make it well, and that is what they are
trying to imply by this response.
Again, it is a very deceptive response, and I apologize for these
lengthy responses to the gentleman's inquiries. These issues are just
very, very complicated science, and it is very hard to do them justice
by just giving 8-second sound-bite responses to the questions.
Mr. RENZI. The letter that the gentleman and I are discussing and the
portions of the letter and the quotes that we have gone over together,
this letter from the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research;
has the gentleman seen the quote which addresses the leading scientists
and even two prestigious committees on the National Academy of Sciences
that have agreed that cloning to reproduce humans should be illegal but
that somatic cell nuclear transfer or therapeutic cloning should be
permitted?
My question is that it is my understanding that these panels included
no bioethics experts and even that they considered the ethical debate,
the morality in question, to be something that should be left up for
others to debate.
Mr. WELDON of Florida. That is absolutely correct. The National
Academy of Sciences panel made that recommendation, but then they
acknowledged there were no bioethicists on the panel, and then they
went on further to state that others should debate the ethics of this.
There were no bioethicists. There were no theologians. There were no
elected representatives from the people, no representatives from the
community. And they wisely said that others should debate the morality
and the ethics of this issue; and frankly, they wisely said that
because the path that they are recommending that we allow the creation
of human life in the lab for research purposes and then those human
embryos are to be destroyed is an entirely new path for us to walk
down.

{time} 2015

Historically in our Nation we have always stood up for protecting
life. The recent historical departure from that, Roe v. Wade, that
decision was rendered in the context, at least my understanding of the
interpretation of the decision of the court was not that the baby
developing inside the woman is not alive and not that it is not human
and not that it is a commodity that can just be manipulated and
discarded, but that the right of reproductive freedom or privacy of the
mother trumped the right to life of the baby, a decision I do not
particularly agree with.
But now we are talking about going in a whole new direction. We are
talking about creating life expressly for the purpose of exploiting it
and destroying it. A parallel would be for a woman to deliberately try
to get pregnant so she could have an abortion. Clearly this is a moral
and ethical quagmire that I do not think we should walk down as a
Nation.
I will just cite for you one example of where this would lead us if
we allow therapeutic cloning or embryo cloning. The artificial womb is
available to us today. You can take a mammalian embryo and drop it in
the artificial womb, and it will pass from the embryonic stage into the
fetal stage of development and can survive up to 30 days of
development. That will be the next place these researchers will want to
go to. Who on Earth would want to extract stem cells from an embryo and
try to grow those embryo stem cells into, let us say you want heart
tissue. Why would you want to go through the ordeal of in a petri dish
trying to grow those cells into heart tissue when you could just much
more cheaply and easily place that embryo into an artificial womb and
then come back 2 weeks or 3 weeks later and get the tissue you want out
of it? That is the slippery slope we are going down. So it is a moral
and ethical minefield that I think we as a Nation should not enter
into, and we should ban all forms of human cloning.
Mr. RENZI. I wanted to ask, we have got a good colleague within our
own party who has addressed also this subject matter. Could I ask if
you are aware or do you know if the Greenwood bill would ban human
reproductive cloning?
Mr. WELDON of Florida. Actually, I do not know if the gentleman from
Pennsylvania (Mr. Greenwood) is going to change his language before it
comes to the floor, but the language as I last saw it, it is not
actually a ban. It is a moratorium. It is a 10-year moratorium on
reproductive cloning, taking the cloned embryo and putting it in the
uterus of a surrogate mother for the purpose of creating a child. It is
a 10-year moratorium. It essentially is saying we do not think this is
something we want to allow for the next 10 years, but in 10 years we
may want to allow reproductive cloning. So I do not think it is a true
ban.
The other point I want to mention, and I have debated my good friend,
the gentleman from Pennsylvania, on this issue many times in the past,
a reproductive-only ban is very, very difficult to enforce. Indeed, I
have a quote from the Justice Department I am going to put up on the
easel here in a minute where they state categorically it is going to be
very, very hard to enforce. If you allow research cloning to
proliferate all over the country, you are going to have dozens of labs
producing human embryos for experimental research purposes. It would be
very, very easy for an unscrupulous, dishonest physician to do this. I
am a physician and I know as a fact that not every physician is an
honest person. The medical profession draws its ranks from the human
race and there are people who do bad things even within the medical
profession.
It will be very easy for an unscrupulous physician to implant one of
those human embryos into a woman in the privacy of the doctor-patient
relationship, and it would be impossible for our Justice Department to
police such a thing and prevent it from happening. Indeed, if a
physician did that and a baby were to develop, what could the
government do at that point? They certainly would not mandate an
abortion on a woman like that. And so I feel very, very strongly that
the Feinstein-Hatch-type approach in the other body or the Greenwood
approach would actually help usher in reproductive cloning, the very
thing that they say they want to prohibit.
Mr. RENZI. I would like to go back to the letter that the Coalition
for Medical Research has put out. There is an interesting quote also in
the body of that letter that addresses somatic cell nuclear transfer as
being, quote, ``a research technique to develop cells that can be used
to treat or cure chronic and degenerative diseases and disorders.''
They claim the process has nothing to do with sexual reproduction and
that its sole purpose is research to meet unmet medical needs.
The way I read this, sir, it sounds to me like we are not creating
human embryos. Where are we? Are we creating human embryos, or are we
not creating human embryos?
Mr. WELDON of Florida. Here again what they are trying to do is
change the terminology. They have been losing the debate on this issue
with the hearts and minds of the American people, so they are now
trying to call it somatic cell nuclear transfer rather than embryo
cloning or therapeutic cloning. When they called it those things,
people understood exactly what it is. But when they say somatic cell
nuclear transfer, suddenly people do not know what they are talking
about and they may be able to get this thing through.

[[Page H1310]]

Clearly as a scientist, as a physician, I can tell you that you are
talking about creating human embryos, there is no two ways around it,
with the potential to develop into a human being. That is not only my
opinion; it is the opinion of the Bioethics Advisory Commission. The
same commission has a number of members who feel that therapeutic
cloning or embryo cloning should be permissible, but they readily
recognize that as soon as you take a somatic cell nucleus and put it in
an enucleated egg, it involves the creation of an embryo with the
apparent potential to be implanted in a uterus and developed to term.
It is the procedure used to create Dolly. So to try to say it is not, I
think, is misleading. The facts are the facts.
Mr. RENZI. The fact being, then, that they are creating human life,
they are exploiting a human embryo, and that they are using this term
``somatic cell nuclear transfer'' as a new terminology to come back in
and try and legalize or try and establish human cloning as being
something that should be legal in America.
Could I ask, please, the Coalition for Medical Research that we are
discussing talks about moving stem cell research forward and that
somatic cell nuclear transfer could bring new hope to nearly 1 million
Americans suffering from, and now we move to the type of diseases which
really tug at the heart strings of America. They are citing cancer
would be cured, Alzheimer's, diabetes, hepatitis, Parkinson's disease.
The only thing left off here is AIDS. And so I would ask you, is this
not similar to the type of promises that we saw 10 years ago when we
were debating fetal tissue research, the idea that that would bring us
all the type of breakthroughs that would cure what ails our human
population? Are we not seeing the same sort of propaganda? Are we not
seeing the same sort of promises where in over 10 years since fetal
tissue research, we really have seen very little, if at all, any kind
of great scientific breakthroughs?
Mr. WELDON of Florida. The gentleman raises an absolutely important
point. That is, the debates that they are bringing up here were the
same exact debates 10 years ago on fetal tissue research. One of the
amazing aspects of all this is Senator Hatch was one of the people who
led the charge against fetal tissue research in the other body 10 years
ago, and now today he is leading the charge to allow embryo cloning,
which is a great irony for me. As I mentioned to you before, there is
no basis in science to make a claim like that. I find it very
reprehensible for them to hold out hopes to millions and millions of
Americans that this is going to be the cure for their condition. I will
simply just point out, if that were the case, if this statement were
true, you would go into the research labs at Harvard and Yale and UCLA
and all the prestigious medical schools throughout the Nation and I
would expect all the research scientists to be working on cloning, but
in point of fact they are not. The reason they are not is because this
is a bogus, absurd statement. There is no evidence in science that
substantiates a claim like this, that you are going to be able to cure
all these millions of Americans of all of these diseases.
I will just simply point out a very important point that they fail to
mention. If that were the case, where would you get all the eggs to do
all this? It took dozens and dozens of eggs to create Dolly. If you
come down with one of these diseases they describe here, we cannot
necessarily cure you with one egg. We might need a dozen eggs to get
one good clone of you that might develop into an embryo. By the way,
this is all science fiction, this is not real; but this is what they
are claiming. You would literally need billions of eggs. Who is going
to donate all these eggs? To get the eggs, to get a woman's egg, you
have to give a woman powerful drugs that cause a phenomenon called
superovulation, so instead of one egg developing you get a dozen eggs
developing. The drugs have side effects. Thirty percent of women who
take those drugs develop depression. You have to give them these
powerful drugs, and then you have to give them a general anesthetic and
do a surgical procedure to harvest the eggs. This is not some simple,
minor procedure that you can have done in a medical office in 30
seconds. You are talking about an ordeal for a woman to donate her
eggs. And for them to make the absurd notion that you are going to cure
100 million Americans with this, you would literally need 1 billion
eggs.

Mind you, they do not have one, one example where they can do one of
these things in an animal model. Not one. I have challenged some of the
most prestigious scientists in the world with this question. Show me
one, one article where you can do this in a human. None. I say show me
one article, one research article, a peer-reviewed journal article
where you can do this in an animal model. None. They have absolutely
none. But they make these bald-faced, absurd assertions that they are
going to cure 100 million people with all these conditions. I think it
is shameful that they would seriously consider this.
I very much appreciate the opportunity to engage in this colloquy
with the gentleman.
Mr. RENZI. I am grateful, sir. I want to congratulate and applaud the
gentleman from Florida for his substantive argument tonight based on
fact. There is not a lot of emotional rhetoric there. It is truly your
research that contains the truth and not their research which contains
false hopes and, I believe, propaganda.
I would like to mention that the lobbyists who cloak themselves in
the guise of medical research do an injustice and mislead our American
public. It is you who play upon our American compassion to help those
in pain and relieve those in suffering in order that you may promote an
immoral agenda. The morality argument has been made much tonight, but
it is you who want to create human life in a petri dish only to
genetically engineer it to die 14 days later. This is not medical
research. This is you scientists creating defective human American life
and that is mutant life. I abhor your objectives in order that you
might bring prestige to yourself. I urge my colleagues to reject those
scientists who lack the wisdom to recognize human life in favor of
garnering international acclaim among their peers for their morbid
scientific breakthroughs.
Mr. WELDON of Florida. I thank the gentleman. It has certainly been a
pleasure to engage in this colloquy. I would be very happy to recognize
the gentlewoman from Colorado and yield to her if she would like to say
a few words about this very important issue.
Mrs. MUSGRAVE. I thank the gentleman. I certainly yield to the
gentleman in regard to the clinical objections that you have raised and
with all of your knowledge of medical issues raised in regard to human
cloning. However, I would like to rise to speak to the profound moral
issues raised when we consider permitting medical science to create
human life for the exclusive purpose of experimentation and
destruction. I think that we need to look to human history. It is a
truth of history that governments and mankind, if given the opportunity
under the law, will trample on human life.

{time} 2030

History is strewn with such examples. By legalizing human cloning for
any reason, and many of them can sound altruistic even if they are
false, we open a Pandora's box which could set our civilization on a
similar course. It is morally wrong to create human life, even nascent
human life, for the purpose of experimentation and destruction.
Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman, and
those were very well taken points. This is clearly a line in the sand.
It is a demarcation point; and if we go across that line, if we say we
are going to start creating human lives for the purpose of exploiting
them for scientific research and then discarding them, where does that
take us next? What comes around the corner? I have been arguing for
years that it will usher in reproductive cloning.
Indeed, in testimony that we received in my committee, we had a Dr.
Cohen, Brian Cohen, who represented the American Society of
Reproductive Medicine; and in his testimony he repeatedly said ``We are
opposed to reproductive cloning at this time,'' and he said it twice.
Finally I asked him, ``Why did you say `We are opposed to reproductive
cloning at this time'?'' And this fellow represents the Association of
Fertility Experts in the United

[[Page H1311]]

States, and essentially his response to me was that once all the
science is worked out on this where it can be done safely, they want to
be able to do it. They want to be able to clone human beings. And this
is the brave new world, no longer confined to fiction literature, but
it has essentially arrived because the follow-ons to this will be
genetic manipulation, genetic enhancements. Eugenetics is what it is
called, an attempt to try to eliminate undesirable traits in our
culture and our society. So people will begin to not only select the
gender of their desired offspring, but they may actually want to
manipulate the genetic code of their offspring so they can get a
specific height or size or physical appearance or IQ. I would imagine
athletic performance will be one of the things that they will go after.
And this is the Pandora's box of issues that we are opening up if we
allow human cloning to occur in the United States. Therapeutic cloning,
embryo cloning or reproductive cloning, it is the path we are going
down. And I just want to underscore the importance of us banning all
forms of human cloning, which is what we are able to do in the Human
Cloning Prohibition Act of 2003, and I just want to again underscore
that there are people who are going to try to put lipstick on the pig.
They are going to try to say that this is not cloning; and they are
going to call it somatic cell nuclear transfer, or they are going to
try to call it nuclear transfer technologies; and we are going to hear
this kind of language being used both in this body and the other body.
It is cloning. It is creating human embryos through the process of
cloning. And people need to remember that no matter what they call it,
that is what it is.
I just want to underscore additionally that this is not purely a pro-
life issue. Cloning of all types, therapeutic, embryonic, and
reproductive cloning, has been made illegal in Germany by the
leadership of the Green Party, which is pro-choice. Indeed, in the vote
that we had passing my bill in the 107th Congress, I had seven or eight
people voting for the legislation who had a 100 percent voting record
with the National Abortion Rights Action League.
And so clearly this is not an abortion debate. It is different from
that. There are a lot of people who are pro-life like myself who have a
very strong moral and ethical objection to cloning on the basis of
simply creating human life in the lab to be exploited and destroyed, a
so-called utilitarian approach. But there are many people on the left
who are strongly opposed to cloning because of their concern about
eugenics, because of their concern about the impact this could have on
the disability community, and very importantly there are a lot of
people who are very concerned about the exploitation of women. If we
are going to have in this country dozens of labs creating hundreds of
human embryos every year for the purpose of doing research, where are
we going to get those eggs from? Who is going to donate their eggs? Who
will submit themselves to this kind of research? I will say who I think
it will be. It will probably be poor women. It will probably be
predominantly women of color.
Indeed, I want to read this quote from Judy Norsigian. She is the co-
author of ``Our Bodies, Ourselves for the New Century,'' the Boston
Women's Health Collective book, hardly a right wing group. What does
she say? ``Because embryo cloning will compromise women's health, turn
their eggs and wombs into commodities, compromise their reproductive
autonomy, and with virtual certainty lead to the production of
experimental human beings, we are convinced that the line must be drawn
here.'' And I was very encouraged by this latter part of her quote. She
is not only concerned about women being exploited, but she has a
concern about the dignity, the human dignity, and the indignity of this
to be creating human beings for experimental research purposes and then
to be discarded.
If research cloning is allowed to proceed in this country, or
therapeutic cloning unfettered, in my opinion what ultimately will
happen, because it will be so expensive to get these eggs from women in
the United States because they will have to pay women thousands of
dollars to undergo the procedure, because of the fairly high incidence
of depression in women who take these superovulatory drugs, we may have
women requiring hospitalization following the egg donation procedure or
maybe even going so far as attempting suicide, what I think they will
end up doing is they will end up going to third world countries. They
will end up going to Central America, South America, away from the
trial attorneys in the United States that can lead to lawsuits, away
from the prying eyes of the American press and where they can pay women
peanuts in order to get their eggs; and that I think is one of the
concerns of people like Judy Norsigian. She knows that ultimately the
potential exists for women to be exploited, and that is just shameful
that it would happen when there is no evidence that this could even
work in animals. Indeed, the evidence, there was just recently an
article in the mouse model where they tried to do therapeutic cloning
and it did not work.

The other thing I want to just share is this quote from Daniel
Bryant, who is the Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legislative
Affairs. He says ``enforcing a modified cloning ban would be
problematic and pose certain law enforcement challenges that would be
lessened with an outright ban on human cloning. Anything short of an
outright ban would present other difficulties to law enforcement. And
what he is talking about here is if we take the approach advocated by
the form of the legislation being promoted by the gentleman from
Pennsylvania (Mr. Greenwood) in the House and Senators Hatch and
Feinstein in the other body, just a reproductive ban, how will we
enforce that? It will be impossible to enforce that. We will have all
of these embryos in all of these labs. The Justice Department, police
officers cannot monitor these labs regularly to make sure the embryos
have been discarded rather than implanted in women. There will be no
way to know whether or not reproductive cloning has occurred. So I feel
very, very strongly that this is the best way for us to go.
I will also point out that the President has indicated that he wants
a complete ban on all forms of human cloning, reproductive and so-
called therapeutic cloning. So clearly, the time has arrived. It is
critical that we as a Nation do the right thing. I believe the House of
Representatives will do the right thing and ban human cloning in all of
its forms, both embryonic cloning and so-called reproductive cloning,
that all attempts at creating human embryos in the lab will be
prohibited. This is an enforceable ban and a lasting ban. The advocates
who say that we must allow embryo cloning in the lab because of its
great potential to lead to cures of all these diseases, I again issue
my challenge, show me the evidence.
Traditionally in this country we always have demonstrated that it
works in animals before we attempt it in humans. Show us the evidence
in the scientific literature that this works in animals. They cannot.
They will not be able to. The reason they cannot is because it cannot
be done. It has not been done in human models. Clearly this takes us
down a very dangerous and precarious path, creating human life for the
purpose of exploiting it and then destroying it. A very dangerous road
for us to walk as a Nation. So I would encourage all of my colleagues
to vote in support of the ban on human cloning that we will be debating
in the House of Representatives.

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