House To Vote Wednesday on Cloning Bill

The U.S. House of Representatives will vote tomorrow on a cloning bill, according to Diana DeGette's press spokesman. The bill (.pdf)

is very different from a bill by the same name that Congress has mulled in the past. It would specifically prohibit reproductive cloning, i.e. implanting an embryonic clone in a woman's womb and allowing it to develop into a baby. Because a lot of scientists want to do that.

Kind of a no-brainer, right? Cloning for reproduction = bad. The technology has its advocates, but I don’t know one respected scientist who believes it would be safe, or necessary for that matter.

But the National Right to Life Committee takes issue with a few things.**

Image: Advanced Cell Technology

Douglas Johnson of the NRLC admonished the bill's backers for voting with next to no notice beforehand: "Clearly, DeGette and the democratic leadership didn’t want people to have a chance to examine this," he said in a phone conversation. "It's pretty radical to introduce a bill late one day and vote early the next day."

The NRLC is also calling it the "clone and kill bill." They say it allows the creation of life only to destroy it. A press release form the NRLC says:

"For any journalist to assert that the DeGette bill 'bans the cloning of human beings' would be to embrace the claim that a human embryo is
NOT a human being. We believe that such a position is clearly erroneous biologically. At the very least, a journalist's adoption of such a claim would be to embrace one side's position on a hotly disputed subject."

When it comes to stem cell and cloning issues, semantics often distract from the real issues. One issue, for example, is whether scientists should be allowed to create embryonic clones of patients (from which they would extract stem cells genetically identical to the patient) in an attempt to cure diseases? Another: should a days-old embryo created in a Petri dish have the same rights as people who are already walking the Earth? Discuss.