From: Colby M. May, Esq., Director, Washington Office
American Center for Law & Justice

Date: August 3, 2001

Re: Talking Points to Support the Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2001

On July 31, 2001, the House of Representatives passed a bill which would ban cloning, not only for reproduction but for medical research purposes as well. The Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2001, sponsored by Rep. Weldon (R-FL) and co-sponsored by over 100 Representatives, passed by a bipartisan vote of 265-to-162. The Act makes it unlawful to: "1) perform or attempt to perform human cloning, 2) participate in an attempt to perform cloning, or 3) ship or receive the product of human cloning for any purpose." The act also imposes penalties of up to 10 years imprisonment and no less than $1,000,000 civil penalty for breaking the law. The same bill, banning cloning for any purpose, is currently being debated in the Senate; the bill is sponsored by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS). The White House also opposes "any and all attempts to clone a human being; [they] oppose the use of human somatic cell nuclear transfer cloning techniques either to assist human reproduction or to develop cell or tissue-based therapies."

The American Center for Law and Justice [ACLJ] strongly supports the outlawing of any all forms of human cloning and urges all Congressmen to pass Sen. Brownback's bill. All human cloning should be made illegal in the United States for the following reasons.

1. Unsafe experimentation
The production of Dolly, the cloned sheep, took 270 failed attempts. No one knows why Dolly was successful and the 270 other attempts were not. The human species is much more complex then that of a sheep. Therefore, any attempt at human cloning would require enormous amount of human experimentation. Hundreds upon hundreds of failed attempts of human cloning, semi-developed human beings, would be killed before any successful attempt. Mankind should not be willing to create and kill another human being solely for the benefit of science.

2. Loss of identity and individuality
The clone will be identical to another human being, in genotype and appearance.

Thus it is possible for parents to have a child which is a "twin" of the father or mother. A parent will most probably treat a child who is an exact replica of themselves differently then a child which is the random product of sexual relations. What happens when the daughter grows up and looks exactly like the mother did when she was younger, the girl daddy fell in love with? "In case of divorce, will Mommy still love the clone of Daddy, even though she can no longer stand the sight of Daddy himself?"

A clone, an copy of an existing or previously existing human being, will be "constantly scrutinized in relation to that of the older version." Even though genotype does not determine all of the characteristics of a human being, clones will still be bound to the past. What happens when the parents pay for some of Michael Jordan's skin cells in order to create a clone? They will expect their cloned child to be as good as Mr. Jordan on the basketball court. Same goes for cloning any other person; parents and society will expect the exact duplicates to mimic the past. Clones will lack the ability to define themselves.

3. Human Diversity
"The process of cloning [will] necessarily increase conformity, and eradicate genetic variety." American society praises diversity. It is preached on academic campuses and in the halls of our legislatures. Yet, if cloning was allowed, each clone would have the same genetic makeup of a past human, not a new random grouping of genes. Clones would not be diverse from the past and American society would lose its strength.

4. Transforming begetting into making
Rather than rely on the mysteries of nature and sexual intercourse to create, or procreate, a child mankind would instead design their children. Man would become simply another man-made thing. As with any other man-made thing, the designer "stands above [its design], not as an equal but as a superior, transcending it by his will and creative prowess." The cloned child will be dehumanized.

Cloning therefore leads to man, usurping God, as the creator and designer of life. No longer will man look at a child as a blessing, or curse, from God, but rather as a scientist's product. Man will be a created being of man.

5. Therapeutic Cloning: all the problems of cloning plus a willful killing
Therapeutic cloning is the production of a cloned embryo, a child waiting for a womb to finish development. In its fifth day, the embryo will be killed and its cells will be harvested. In other words, therapeutic cloning would involve the bringing to life of a human, solely for the purpose of research and destruction of the embryo. Man would design and kill man for man's benefit. Preventing the production of cloned embryos, will save the future lives of those embryos which would be damned to destruction.

Therapeutic cloning places the government in the unethical position of permitting the creation of life and making it a federal offense to try and keep the embryo alive and bring it to birth. The government would fund and demand the death of human beings before they become children.

Banning only reproductive cloning would be unenforceable. Bio-technical experiments take place in laboratories, hidden away from public view. Production and transfer of cloned embryos would be nearly impossible to control. And as we have seen with embryos created in vitro clinics with the initial purpose of treating infertile couples, "embryos created for one reason can be used for another reason." "Today spare embryos once created to begin a pregnancy are now used in research [embryonic stem cell research], and tomorrow clones created for research will be used to being a pregnancy."

What should the government's response be to a woman trying to bring a cloned embryo to birth: demand an abortion?

For these reasons, the American Center for Law and Justice requests that you voice your support of Sen. Brownback's Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2001.

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1. See Sheryl Gay Stolberg, House Backs Ban on Human Cloning for Any Objective, N.Y. Times, Aug. 01, 2001, at http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/01/politics/01STEM.html.

2. Id.

3. H.R. 1644, 107th Cong. § 3 (2001).

4. Id.

5. S. 709, 107th Cong. (2001).

6. Prohibition on Human Cloning: Hearing Before the Subcomm. on Health of the House Comm. on Energy and Commerce, 107th Cong. (2001) (statement of Claude Allen, Deputy Sec. of HHS).

7. Sophia Kolehmainen, Human Cloning: Brave New Mistake, 27 Hofstra L. Rev. 557, 560 (1999).

8. Id.

9. Leon Kass, Preventing a Brave New World: Why we should ban human cloning now, New Republic Online, May 21, 2001, at http://www.tnr.com/052101/kass052101_print.html.

10. Id.

11. See id.

12. See id.

13. Id.

14. Id.

15. Justice O'Connor, in the much debated opinion of Casey v. Planned Parenthood, 505 U.S. 833, 851 (1992), heralded "the right to define one's own concept of existence [as being] at the heart of liberty." A clone will be denied this ability to define its own existence and thus, by the definition of the Court, could possibly lack personhood. The rights of a clone could be defined as being no greater then that of a fetus, even and especially after the clone has developed into a grown adult.

16. Kolehmainen, supra note 7 at 561.

17. Kass, supra note 9.

18. Id.

19. See id.

20. See id.

21. See id.

22. See id.

23. Id.

24. Id.