Legislative Action Alert

February 20, 2003

Full House to Vote the Week of February 24 on the Issue of “Human Embryo Farms”-- Contact Your Congressman

The U.S. House of Representatives will take up the Weldon-Stupak Human Cloning Prohibition Act (H.R. 534) the week of February 24.  Go to the Legislative Action Center at www.nrlc.org, and contact your Congressman to ask that he support H.R. 534 and oppose any "clone and kill" substitute that is offered.  It is particularly important that you circulate this alert to pro-life constituents in the following districts:

CD 3          Doug Ose
CD 18        Dennis Cardoza
CD 21        Devin Nunez
CD 22        Bill Thomas
CD 26        David Dreier
CD 41        Jerry Lewis
CD 43        Joe Baca
CD 45        Mary Bono
CD 50        Duke Cunningham

The Weldon-Stupak Human Cloning Prohibition Act is nearly identical to legislation approved by the House on July 31, 2001, but never acted on by the U. S. Senate. It is very similar to the current Brownback-Landrieu bill in the Senate (S. 245). These bills are supported by President Bush, who in his January 28 State of the Union address repeated his past calls for Congress to approve legislation to ban all human cloning. The President warned in an April 10, 2002 speech that without such a law, human “embryo farms” may begin operation in the United States. (The President’s speech is here: www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/04/print/20020410-4.html)

It will be necessary to reject a substitute proposal that is expected to be offered by Rep. Greenwood (R-PA),  which would permit human embryos to be created by cloning and allowed to develop for days or weeks to harvest their stem cells or for other research purposes, or one which would incorporate the language of the Hatch-Feinstein Senate bill (S. 303). Such a substitute was offered in 2001 by Congressman Jim Greenwood, and was rejected. NRLC’s  Doug Johnson said that the approach taken in the Hatch-Feinstein and Greenwood proposals, to permit human cloning for research, “would give a green light to growing human embryos to be harvested for their parts.” Bush Administration officials have repeatedly warned that legislation to permit human cloning for research would be subject to a veto.

Many press reports in recent weeks have misunderstood how the competing bills really differ. In reality, neither side’s bill would restrict research on human ova (“eggs”), and both allow the use of cloning methods to produce human DNA, cells, or tissues. The real difference is this: The Weldon-Stupak and Brownback-Landrieu bills ban the creation of human embryos by cloning, while the Hatch-Feinstein and Greenwood proposals would allow human embryos to be created by cloning.

NRLC’s Johnson said some journalists and editorial writers recently have shown “remarkable gullibility” in reporting that the Hatch-Feinstein bill “prohibits any [cloning] research on an egg cell after 14 days,” and similar absurdities. Johnson commented, “Any middle school science student knows that a human ovum or ‘egg’ is a single cell, with only 23 chromosomes and no sex. It is biological nonsense to apply the term ‘egg’ to a five-day-old or two-week-old developing cloned embryo, which has 46 chromosomes and is male or female. And it is doubly silly to report that a bill would ban cloning except on ‘unfertilized eggs,’ since cloning by definition is reproduction without sexual fertilization. All clones, animal or human, are ‘unfertilized’ no matter how long they live.” NRLC has released a factsheet that explains what the competing bills would actually allow and what they would forbid, at www.nrlc.org, or in PDF at www.nrlc.org/Killing_Embryos/Cloningmediabackgrounder.pdf

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