NRLC Urges Senators to Oppose S. 2439.(National Right to Life Committee)(Human Cloning Prohibition Act)

What appears below is the text of a letter sent by NRLC to U.S. senators on June 6, 2002, explaining why the "clone and kill" legislation sponsored by Senator Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) (S. 2439) and other similar bills do not represent steps in the right direction toward restricting human cloning, but, rather, would actively foster and protect the practice of human cloning, and therefore are worse than nothing. This letter is also posted on the NRLC website at www.nrlc.org.

RE: Sen. Specter's S. 2439 and other bills to allow human cloning and require federal enforcement of clone killing

Dear Senator:

The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) urges you to oppose cloture on the human cloning legislation proposed by Senator Specter and others, and to oppose this legislation on any other votes as well. The current version, S. 2439, will be further modified, but it will remain a bill to advance - - not ban - - human cloning.

Although S. 2439 is labeled as the "Human Cloning Prohibition Act," this label is highly misleading. S. 2439 would actually provide a firm legal foundation for a new industry based on the mass creation of cloned human embryos to be killed for research and commercial applications. S. 2439 and its variants would amend Title 18 (the federal criminal code) to foster and protect human embryo cloning, with the FBI in charge of making sure that no human embryo survives to be born. Whatever additional regulatory and paperwork requirements Senator Specter and his allies tack on to this legislation will not change and should not obscure its essential thrust, which is to establish a federal clone-and-kill policy and encourage the establishment of an industry of what President Bush called human "embryo farms."

S. 2439 and the other bills that are being misleadingly called "bans on reproductive cloning" are not "common ground," nor are they steps in the right direction. When advocates of such bills speak of "banning only reproductive cloning," what they really mean is establishing an unprecedented requirement in federal law that no member of a certain class of the species Homo sapiens can be allowed to survive. Enactment of such a "clone and kill" bill would be much worse than no legislation at all, for the reasons set forth below. We make no argument in favor of cloning for birth; rather, we insist that human cloning must be prevented by banning the act of cloning, not by requiring the death of the cloned humans.

NRLC supports the Brownback-Landrieu bill (S. 1899), which would ban the cloning of human embryos. We urge you to vote to invoke cloture on that bill, and to pass it -- as President Bush has urged, and as the House of Representatives did nearly a year ago. By lopsided margins, the public favors such a genuine ban on human cloning. When a Gallup poll in May asked a national sample if they supported "cloning of human embryos for use in medical research," 61% were opposed.