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A Firm Resolve

February 4, 2003

By Timothy T.C. McGhee

 

 

State of the Union

Tuesday, January 28, President Bush, “by law and by custom” delivered the annual State of the Union address to Congress.  There is hardly a greater boost to a legislative item than to have it mentioned by the president of the United States, especially during this annual speech.  This year the president mentioned several very important legislative items before he made his case for disarming Iraq.

 

“We are building a more welcoming society -- a culture that values every life. And in this work we must not overlook the weakest among us. I ask you to protect infants at the very hour of their birth and end the practice of partial-birth abortion.  And because no human life should be started or ended as the object of an experiment, I ask you to set a high standard for humanity, and pass a law against all human cloning.”

 

“Instead of gradually reducing the marriage penalty, we should do it now.  Instead of slowly raising the child credit to $1,000, we should send the checks to American families now.”

 

It’s very important that we all contact the president and thank him for making each of these legislative items a prioritity.  The vice president has made similar admonitions as well, so it would be good to contact him as well.

 

The president spoke for significantly more than a soundbyte about the problem of AIDS in Africa.  “Today, on the continent of Africa, nearly 30 million people have the AIDS virus.”  The problem is not subsiding.  “More than 4 million require immediate drug treatment. Yet across that continent, only 50,000 AIDS victims -- only 50,000 -- are receiving the medicine they need.”

 

After mentioning the vastly reduced cost of helping these individuals, President Bush said, “Ladies and gentlemen, seldom has history offered a greater opportunity to do so much for so many.”  Thereupon he proposed “$15 billion over the next five years, including nearly $10 billion in new money, to turn the tide against AIDS in the most afflicted nations of Africa and the Caribbean.”

 

In an email action alert, Austin Ruse, president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, pointed out that this program of the president is based on extensive successes in Uganda by promoting abstinence.  “Moreover, we will insist that African parents be involved in all AIDS education programs,” he wrote.  We also need to pray that the money in this program intended for disease treatment and prevention does not get used for the life-threatening evils of population control.

 


Comprehensive Human Cloning Ban

Following up on the president’s address, Senator Brownback chaired a hearing on human cloning last Wednesday.  The debate raised questions of, will we continue to allow human cloning, and in particular, if we continue to allow human cloning, will we allow those human beings to live or not?

 

In his opening statement, Senator Brownback said, “I, along with the president and the vast majority of Americans, do not believe that we should create human life just to destroy it -- yet that is exactly what is being proposed by those who support cloning in some circumstances.”

 

Self-described “Right to Life Senator” Orrin Hatch testified in support of a process that could “facilitate the birth of an asexually developed, cloned baby” yet instead would be raided for their stem cells and terminated in the process.  The root of the senator’s position seems to be, as he indicated, “human life does not begin in the petri dish.”  The problems with this dehumanizing presumption are the individual children alive today that were adopted as embryos.

 

The entire argument for not banning cloning outright is based on the “potential” benefits from human cloning.  Not banning human cloning siphons away valuable resources from research that is already producing real benefits, therapies and treatments for patients against diseases. 

 

Not banning all human cloning would result in the “commodification of women” as Rep. Dave Weldon, M.D. (R-FL) testified.  That is, women would be paid for donating their eggs for research.  With the development of artificial wombs, women could be eliminated from the reproductive process.  Weldon also pointed out that the Hatch approach would not lead to therapy, but to laboratory models of disease.  This would lead to the selling of such human embryos.  After embryos would come fetal development.  These United States have once already fought a civil war to defeat the buying and selling of human beings.

 

Dr. Leon R. Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, testified that the council was in favor of “no human cloning at all.”  Of critical importance are the terms and definitions thereof in describing this process.  The council “unanimously approved” a full chapter on “fair and accurate terminology” that “rejected ‘nuclear transfer’” as a viable description of the process.  Senator Brownback also said, “however they might name the procedure - whether they call it nuclear transplantation, therapeutic cloning, therapeutic cellular transfer, DNA regenerative therapy or some other euphemism - it is simply human cloning.”

 

Dr. Kass broadened the debate to include further consequences of human cloning.  Any kind of human cloning could mean “control over everything about people.”  The coming eugenic revolution could be horrific.  “The potential for evil is almost unimaginable,” said Senator Ensign.  “This is one of the fundamental questions of our age.”

 

This fundamental question represents a more dramatic political shift taking place under the surface.  While this is a pro-life issue, it is not an abortion issue.  In fact, as stated above, there are good reasons why those who care about women to the exclusion of the pre-born child would want to comprehensively ban human cloning.  Others on the Left such as environmentalists oppose human cloning just as they oppose genetically modified food.

 

Just as we should not count out support from any traditional opposition, we cannot take any traditional support for granted either.  Technology issues such as this are increasingly redrawing a very different picture of alignments on the political map.

 

As Senator Brownback said, “We all want to cure diseases,” but not at the expense of other human lives that are created in the image of God.  There’s currently no scientifically productive or practical reason why anyone would want to clone human beings; this is essentially a spiritual fight because human cloning represents an evil attack on human life, and an attack on our freedom as human beings.  That is why we all must pray and act for a comprehensive ban on human cloning.