New British Cloning Law Allows "Clone and Kill".(Brief Article)

A new law rushed through the British Parliament bans the implantation of cloned human embryos into women, but fails to protect these tiny human beings from destructive research, sale, exportation, or implantation into men, artificial wombs, or even animals.

"It is an inadequate bill, riddled with glaring loopholes," a spokesman for the British group ProLife Alliance said in a press release. "It does not prevent the creation of cloned embryos, only their implantation in a woman. We urgently need national and international laws which ban all forms of human cloning and genetic manipulation."

The House of Commons approved the Human Reproductive Cloning Bill November 29, after the House of Lords voted in favor of it November 26, the London Times reported. The bill was written and passed only two weeks after the British High Court ruled that a January 2001 law that allowed scientists to clone human beings for research purposes as long as they are killed within 14 days of their creation was invalid. Effectively, the ruling left Britain with no laws regulating cloning at all.

The ProLife Alliance, the group that brought the challenge against the January law, cheered the High Court's November 15 decision and hoped that Parliament would take time to consider all aspects of the human cloning issue and pass a bill that would ban all forms of cloning. "The ProLife Alliance has given the country the chance to debate embryology and abortion once more," the alliance said, in a press release, "and will be at the forefront of the battle to restore absolute respect for the sanctity of human life."

The alliance called for a "wholesale revision" of the 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, which the January law was based on. The High Court ruled that the 1990 act only covered embryos created by fertilization, since it was written before the technology existed to create living beings through cloning, according to the Daily Telegraph.

In the days following the High Court's ruling, many in Britain worried that the absence of a cloning law would allow researchers to immediately begin reproducing human beings through cloning. An Italian doctor, Severino Antinori, told the BBC that he was ready to come to ...