May 13, 2002
Stem-cell debate splits in unusual ways
___By Robert Marus
___ABP Washington Bureau
___WASHINGTON (ABP)--Vritually everyone on Capitol Hill involved in the current debate on human cloning agrees it shouldn't ever be done for reproductive purposes. After that, questions of ethics and morality get a bit more complicated.
___Even religious leaders wind up on both sides.
___U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, disappointed fellow religious conservatives when he came out in favor of a Senate bill that would allow cloning human embryos for research.
___Hatch, who has a consistent anti-abortion voting record, signed on to the legislation along with fellow Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Arlen Specter, R-Penn., and Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.
___Doctors say "therapeutic" cloning offers great promise for breakthroughs in the treatment of serious diseases. The process involves implanting DNA from a person into an unfertilized human egg cell, creating an embryo that is an exact genetic match of the DNA donor. From the embryo, scientists would harvest "stem cells," specialized cells that can be used to grow new tissues. Possible treatments include help for cancer, heart disease, diabetes and spinal-cord injuries.
___The controversy arises because in the process of harvesting the stem cells, the embryos are destroyed. For that reason, most anti-abortion leaders oppose all stem-cell research.
___"They're saying in this bill that you cannot create an embryo for the purpose of reproducing a baby," explained Shannon Royce, a Washington lobbyist for the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. "What they are doing is mandating the destruction of these tiny people, because all they are outlawing is the implantation of these tiny cloned embryos. How is this good or right?"
___But Hatch counters that embryos created by therapeutic cloning and naturally created human embryos are morally equivalent.
___"At the core of my support for regenerative medicine research is my belief that human life requires and begins in a mother's nurturing womb," Hatch said at an April 30 press conference. He said embryos cloned for "regenerative medicine research" are not conceived in the traditional sense of a sperm and an egg uniting, nor are they transplanted into a "mother's nurturing womb."
___Turning the anti-abortion movement's own terminology on itself, Hatch added: "Regenerative medicine is pro-life and pro-family. It enhances, not diminishes, human life."
___Ken Connor, president of the conservative Family Research Council, lambasted Hatch's reasoning as "morally vacuous and scientifically inaccurate."
___Cloned embryos should be regarded as fully human, Connor said. "If human life 'begins in a mother's nurturing womb, not in a petri dish,' according to Hatch, then location is what determines the personhood of the human embryo. That's nonsensical."
___Connor also argued that embryonic stem-cell research is unnecessary, because research using stem cells from adults shows promise for curing the same illnesses. Many scientists, however, including 40 Nobel laureates who endorsed the Hatch bill, disagree.
___A competing Senate bill banning all forms of human cloning is the only truly "pro-life" alternative, Connor said. "There is only one bill, the bipartisan Brownback-Landrieu Human Cloning Prohibition Act, that will both prevent the implantation of a cloned embryo in a woman's uterus and will not mandate that cloned human embryos be destroyed."
___That bill is sponsored by Sens. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., and Mary Landrieu, D-La.
___But several other religious leaders, including Christians, sent representatives to the April 30 press conference in support of the Hatch bill. Representatives of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, the United Church of Christ and the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations were there, as were several local pastors.
___Michael Bledsoe, pastor of Washington's Riverside Baptist Church, said he supports the legislation even though he is aware of the risks involved. "I oppose human cloning and fear that governments might use scientists to create Orwellian societies," he said. "Yet, I am a pastor, and pastors have a window into the entire journey of life. We bless infants in the hospital crib and we bless the departing elderly person at the hospice. I think regenerative medicine holds great promise for the whole spectrum of life."
___Bledsoe said he believes the potential benefits of therapeutic cloning research to those who are clearly living humans outweigh both the concerns about abuse and the destruction of embryos.
___"To ban this research," he said, "is to give primacy to cells smaller than the punctuation marks of this text over human beings, fully flowered."
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