"Human Cloning...Unethical in Itself and Dangerous as a Precedent".

Editor's note. The following are excerpts from a speech delivered February 26 by Carolyn Willson, the U.S. delegate to the United Nation's Committee on an International Convention Against the Reproductive Cloning of Human Beings.

Mr. Chairman,

We would like to take this opportunity to express our appreciation to the French and German governments for taking the initiative on human cloning, and to the members of the two panels that have provided the Ad Hoc Committee with valuable background information. My delegation welcomes the opportunity to explain the position of the United States on this issue. ...

Human cloning is an enormously troubling development in biotechnology. It is unethical in itself and dangerous as a precedent. The possible creation of a human being through cloning raises many ethical concerns. It constitutes unethical experimentation on a child-to-be, subjecting him or her to enormous risks of bodily and developmental abnormalities. It threatens human individuality, deliberately saddling the clone with the genetic makeup of a person who has already lived. It risks making women's bodies a commodity, with women being paid to undergo risky drug treatment so they will produce the many eggs that are needed for cloning. It is also a giant step toward a society in which life is created for convenience, human beings are grown for spare body parts, and children are engineered to fit eugenic specification.

We cannot allow human life to be devalued in this way. A proposal has been made to ban only so-called "reproductive" cloning, by prohibiting the transfer of a cloned embryo into a woman to begin a pregnancy in the hopes of creating a human baby. This approach is unsound. While upon initial consideration of the issue a ban on reproductive cloning may seem easily attainable and desirable, the issue is very complex and should be addressed comprehensively.

First, a ban that prohibited only "reproductive" cloning, but left "therapeutic" or "experimental" cloning unaddressed, would essentially authorize the creation and destruction of human embryos explicitly and solely for research and experimentation. It would turn nascent human life into a natural resource to be mined and exploited, eroding the sense of the worth and dignity of the individual. This prospect is repugnant to many people, including those who do not believe that the embryo is a person.

Second, to ban "reproductive" cloning effectively, all human cloning must be banned. Under a partial ban that permitted the creation of cloned embryos for research, human embryos would be widely cloned in laboratories and assisted-reproduction facilities. ... And if detected, governments would be unlikely to compel the pregnancy to be aborted or severely penalize the pregnant woman for allowing the implantation or for failure to abort the pregnancy. A ban only on "reproductive" cloning would therefore be a false ban, creating the illusion that such cloning had been prohibited.

Third, a ban that permits embryonic clones to be created and forbids them to be implanted in utero legally requires the destruction of nascent human life and criminalizes efforts to preserve and protect it once created, a morally abhorrent prospect.

Fourth, there may be other routes to developing new treatment therapies using stem cells and to solving the transplant rejection problems that may result from the use of nonidentical tissue transplants. To date, there is no animal research to support the claim that cloned embryonic stem cells are therapeutically efficacious. A legal ban on "therapeutic" cloning would allow time for the investigation of promising and less problematic research alternatives such as adult stem cell research. It would also allow time for policy makers and the public to develop more informed judgments about cloning, and for the establishment of regulatory structures to oversee applications of cloning technology that society deems acceptable.

There are other cloning techniques that do not raise these moral and ethical concerns. ...

We believe that States should actively pursue the potential medical and scientific benefits of adult stem cell research. Such research does not require the exploitation and destruction of nascent human life, nor does it open the door to the dehumanizing possibilities that will come with the cloning of human beings.

The United States does not support a ban limited to "reproductive" cloning. We believe that so-called "therapeutic" or "experimental" cloning, which involves the creation and destruction of human embryos, must be included. Thus, the United States supports a global and comprehensive ban on human cloning through somatic cell nuclear transfer, regardless of the purpose for which the human clone is produced. We look forward to working with other delegations to achieve that objective.>EN