WASHINGTON - The loudest cheers for President Bush at an anti-abortion rally Tuesday came when he stated his opposition to all human cloning, signaling the issue's rapid emergence as a top priority for abortion opponents this election campaign.
"I urge the United States Senate to support a comprehensive and effective ban on human cloning," the president said via telephone to wild applause at the annual March for Life rally against abortion, which ended at the Washington Monument.
"You're working and marching on behalf of a noble cause," Bush said.
The March for Life rally marked the anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's Roe vs. Wade decision legalizing abortion in 1973. The cloning debate is much newer, beginning in earnest only after Dolly the sheep was cloned in 1996.
The only known effort so far to clone a human being produced only a few cells that survived only six days. Since a Massachusetts company disclosed that research result last November, abortion opponents have warned of the imminent cloning of living humans. Many activists against abortion see cloning as a moral issue that needs immediate attention and as a political opportunity to weaken abortion laws.
"Along with many of the pro-life battles we will face in Congress this year, I am particularly hopeful that this year we will pass a permanent ban on all forms of human cloning in the United States," Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., said at the rally. "We should not create life just to destroy it."
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The process of cloning produces a genetically identical duplicate of an organism without sperm from a male. The nucleus of an unfertilized female cell is removed and replaced with the nucleus of a body cell from the organism.
Many scientists believe cloned human embryos could provide a stock of stem cells, which are embryonic cells that can develop into any type of cell in the body. The scientists believe that stem cells someday will be used to replace or repair cells or tissues damaged or destroyed by disease or disability. This use of cloning is called therapeutic. Reproductive cloning, which scientists almost universally oppose, would produce an entire human.
Brownback, a vocal abortion opponent, is sponsoring a bill to ban all human cloning. The bill, to be introduced during the congressional session that begins Wednesday, is similar to one sponsored by Rep. Dave Weldon, R-Fla., that passed the House of Representatives with presidential support last July.
Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., promises floor debate on cloning in February or March. Some Senators favor a less stringent ban that would outlaw cloned fetuses but allow limited cloning for medical research.
Brownback, who is working with anti-abortion groups on nationwide campaigns to stop human cloning, cites opinion polls showing overwhelming public opposition to it as reason to support a total ban. But abortion-rights supporters and some medical ethicists reply that abortion opponents are blurring the distinction between "reproductive" and "therapeutic" cloning for their own political gain.
Brownback and other supporters of a total ban are moving cloning into the "cuckoo world of abortion politics," said Dr. Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Caplan said voters respond to the "ick" factor of reproducing people, without understanding the value that cloned embryonic cells provide.
Caplan said the ability to successfully clone a fully developed human being is probably years away. The urgency that Brownback and others place on a cloning ban makes good abortion politics, Caplan said, but stifles constructive debate on what cloning should and shouldn't be used for.
"Their discussions of embryos are another take on the old debate on when life begins," Caplan said. "If you stop all cloning because it's destroying human life, you're talking about the embryo's status as a human. It's all a cover for undermining abortion."
Bush, who opposes abortion, created a panel in August to advise him on the scientific and medical aspects of human cloning. Its 18 members are led by Dr. Leon Kass, a conservative ethicist who is on leave from the University of Chicago.
"You can help be the conscience of the country," the president said to committee members at the time, according to a White House transcript.
Cloning seems certain to gain more political attention in the fall elections. Brownback and anti-abortion groups are launching grass-roots campaigns favoring a comprehensive cloning ban in states including South Dakota, Missouri and Louisiana - all states in which Democratic senators face tough re-election fights.
March for Life organizers estimated that about 50,000 people attended this year's rally. That wasn't as many as last year, they said, but it is a strong base from which to make cloning a prominent issue nationwide.
"Act. Get out and talk," Brownback said, "particularly to ban human cloning. And pray."
Knight Ridder Tribune
