"Justice Requires No Less".(report on cloning)(Brief Article)

Alas, it is the nature of a monthly such as National Right to Life News that very often a timely development takes place a day or two after publication. Such was the case July 10 when the President's Council on Bioethics issued its first report, "Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry."

As its inestimable chairman Leon Kass wrote in his letter to President George W. Bush, "The product of six months of discussion, research, reflection, and deliberation, we hope that it will prove a worthy contribution to public understanding of this momentous question" of human cloning. The report is seriously flawed, but that is to be expected when a President does not handpick a totally one-sided panel whose only objective is to reach a preordained result.

Unlike some previous high-octane panels - - say, the one that explored the question of whether the federal government ought to subsidize the harvesting of fetal brain tissue for transplantation - - the President's Council is comprised of people with varying points of view. In the short run this meant some recommendations were excellent while others were surely not. In the long run, however, being scrupulously fair always pays off.

So where, from our point of view, did the 18-member panel err? The greatest shortcoming is surely that the report did not call for a permanent ban on all human cloning. Instead it unfortunately limited such a ban to what it accurately labeled "cloning to produce children" (typically more vaguely described as "reproductive cloning").

By contrast, it recommended only a four-year moratorium on "cloning for biomedical research," again a vast improvement at least in specificity to nonsense such as "therapeutic cloning."

NRLC pointed out in response, "We strongly favor a permanent ban on all human cloning, such as the House has passed and President Bush supports. However, we could support legislation to temporarily ban human cloning, but such a moratorium should apply equally to human cloning for any purpose"--cloning to produce children and cloning for biomedical research.

Is there support within the American public for just such an all-encompassing prohibition? Indeed there is. There are large majorities that strongly disapprove of cloning to produce children. And when informed that cloning for biomedical research requires the death of human embryos, a majority gives a thumbs down to that as well.