Washington, DC--Pro-life infonet-- At Thursday's conclusion of a two-day meeting of President Bush's Council on Bioethics, council members remained "deeply divided over the moral status of a human embryo" and had "given up hope" that they would come to a consensus on the ethics of human cloning. They decided instead to present the President and Congress with "a thoughtful discussion" of each side's arguments.

"The important thing is for people to have a full understanding of all the
arguments," said Leon Kass, council chair and University of Chicago
bioethicist.

Although President Bush has previously stated that he opposes all forms of
cloning, the effect that the council's findings will have on Congress is
"unclear."

Council members are in agreement in their opposition to human reproductive
cloning, which Congress is "poised" to ban, but the members have not
indicated whether their opposition is due to "practical ... or moral"
objections. The panel agreed less about the issue of so-called therapeutic
cloning, with the debate about when life begins "underscor[ing]" the
discussion in spite of Kass' request that the members divorce their
thinking on this issue from the abortion debate.

Charles Krauthammer, a Washington Post columnist and the only non-academic
council member, called a cloned embryo "a human being" deserving of the
"highest respect," while council member Michael Sandel, a Harvard
University government professor, stated that a human embryo is "something
in between a thing and a person -- deserving of respect but not as much as
society affords humans." Paul McHugh, a Johns Hopkins University
psychiatrist, said that the cloned embryos in question were "fundamentally
different" than embryos created for reproduction and should not even be
called "embryo[s]."

Robert George, a philosopher at Princeton University, argued that using a
human embryo for research means society will have judged a developing
human as an object available for use.

"The blastocyst is a human being at a certain stage of development. It is
a human being," he said.

Although a bill to ban all forms of cloning passed in the House last year,
there is opposition in the Senate to a complete ban on both reproductive
cloning and clining that involves the destruction of human life for
research purposes.

Meanwhile, the intention of the scientific process used to create human
embryonic stem cells for medical research and treatment is not to "create
carbon copies of people" and therefore should not be called "cloning --
therapeutic or otherwise," according to a group of scientists.

The researchers, who published an editorial in Friday's issue of the
journal Science, said that "[p]recise terminology is important" in this
debate because of the proposed ban on therapeutic cloning in the United
States. A more accurate name for the process used to create stem cells --
in which the nucleus from a cell is extracted and then transplanted into
an egg that has had its nucleus removed -- is "nuclear transplantation,"
Dr. Bert Vogelstein, a Johns Hopkins University researcher, and two
National Academy of Sciences officials write in the editorial. "Cloning
means something very specific. If I ask a man on the street, he says a
clone is an exact copy of a human being. Cloning means you're trying to
create a copy of an individual organism. Nuclear transplantation is not
cloning," Vogelstein said in an interview with Reuters Health.

Pro-life advocates say the attempt is simply an effort to confuse and
obfuscate the issue and that so-called therapeutic cloning always involves
destroying human life for research.

"An attempt is being made to give it a different name but it is still the
same thing we are talking about," said pro-life Rep. Dave Weldon, a
Florida Republican.