National Right to Life letter to U.S. House of Representatives in opposition to the Greenwood "clone and kill" bill.

The letter below was sent by NRLC to most members of the U.S. House of Representatives on February 21, 2003. In it, NRLC urged the lawmakers to support the Weldon-Stupak Human Cloning Prohibition Act (H.R. 534), and to reject the competing "substitute amendment" offered by Congressman Jim Greenwood (R-Pa.). On February 27, the House rejected the Greenwood proposal, 174-231, and then passed the Weldon-Stupak bill 241-155. The roll call votes appear on pages 26-27 of this edition of NRL News. For details on this issue, see the story that begins on page 1, and the NRLC website section on human cloning at www.nrlc.org/killing_embryos/index.html.

February 21, 2003

RE: Greenwood embryo-farms substitute amendment vs. Weldon-Stupak Human Cloning Prohibition Act

Dear Member of Congress:

On Thursday, February 27, the House of Representatives will choose between the Human Cloning Prohibition Act (H.R. 534), authored by Congressmen Weldon and Stupak, and a radically different--indeed, antithetical--substitute amendment to be offered by Congressman Greenwood. The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) supports H.R. 534. Because enactment of the Greenwood policy would be a giant step in the pro-cloning direction--it would give the green light to what President Bush called human "embryo farms"--NRLC strongly urges you to vote "no" on the Greenwood Substitute. The roll call on the Greenwood Substitute will be included as a key vote in the NRLC congressional scorecard for 2003. The Weldon-Stupak bill (H.R. 534), which NRLC supports, would ban any use of cloning to create human embryos. In contrast, the Greenwood Substitute would permit (indeed, would encourage) the creation of any number of human embryos by cloning for the purpose of harvesting their parts. The substitute even leaves open the door--as artificial womb technology advances--to growing cloned humans to later stages of fetal development for the harvesting of their tissues and organs, as has already been done with cloned cows and mice. Supporters of the Greenwood Substitute assert that it would "ban reproductive cloning," but this claim is highly misleading, because the Greenwood Substitute does not restrict the actual act of human cloning--the use of somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) to create human embryos. Rather, the Greenwood Substitute would seek to impede the initiation of a pregnancy. Thus, the Greenwood Substitute bans not human cloning but the survival of human clones, which is a very different matter.

When Mr. Greenwood originally offered his pro-embryo-farming substitute during consideration of the Weldon-Stupak bill in 2001, Dr. Charles Krauthammer wrote a powerful column, "A Nightmare of a Bill," pointing out its radical implications: www.nrlc.org/Killing_Embryos/Krauthammer%20on%20Greenwood%20Amendment.pdf. On July 31, 2001, the House rejected the Greenwood Substitute (roll call no. 302), before approving the Weldon-Stupak bill by a margin of 265-162 (roll call no. 304). When language similar to the Greenwood Substitute was proposed in the Senate, the Bush Administration made it clear that any such clone-and-kill legislation would face a veto. (See the letter from HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson's to Senator Sam Brownback, here: http://www.nrlc.org/killing_embryos/ThompsontoBrownback.pdf.) Moreover, the ...