Why Missouri Needs to Get
Cloning in Global Perspective

By Nigel M. de S. Cameron & Barbara Quigley

    In our discussions about “therapeutic cloning” with Missouri state lawmakers, one thing has been clear: not many people, even well-informed people, know the facts. And those who stand on the other side of the debate – who want to turn this state into a center for embryo farming – don’t want them to hear the facts, either.

There are many facts at stake. This is not a pro-life issue, or a conservative religious issue. There are leading feminists and environmentalists, and the pro-choice United Methodist Church, who want cloning banned, too. This is not a business issue: despite all the hype, hardly any private investment is going into embryo cloning. The markets don’t believe the hot air that persuaded the voters of California to part with $6 billion they can ill-afford. What’s more, we need to use honest language. Proponents of human cloning for research – which manufactures embryos that are indistinguishable from the embryos made by in vitro fertilization, or sex – are tying themselves in dishonest knots to avoid using the word “cloning” and “embryo.” Watch them on TV; read their slick press releases. When Ron Reagan Jr. hyped his way into the headlights at the Democratic convention he never once used the C-word. We need to nail the lies and get the facts before the people.

Then look at the global dimension. How many of the cheering thousands who heard Ron Reagan, Jr., or the cheering millions of anti-Bush voters at home who saw his rousing speech, were aware of the fact that just weeks earlier the French parliament had decided to make cloning for research a felony? How many scientists at Washington University and the other prestigious institutions clustered in this state, which are overtly lobbying against a cloning ban, are aware that if they get into “therapeutic cloning” when they have crossed the border into liberal Canada – home of legalized gay marriage and all things progressive – they will go to jail for five years?

We have had this conversation with political journalists, and even science journalists. At first some of them simply don’t believe us. Some have told us with absolute conviction that this is not true – that France has legalized “therapeutic cloning,” that Canada cannot have banned it, that only in hard-right religious-conservative nations is it outlawed. Well, now that we have Google at our disposal, facts are easier to get at than they used to be. One of us recently had an internet debate with Ron Green, famed bioethicist at Dartmouth, who, when he had to admit that the Canadians and the French have outlawed “therapeutic cloning,” felt obliged to blame “far-right conservatives” in those countries. It does not take a graduate degree in international affairs to know that that is – to quote an old saying – “nonsense on stilts.”

And, not just Canada and France. What about Australia, and Norway, and Switzerland (the center, of course, of Europe’s pharmaceutical industry)? What about Germany, the biotech conscience of the world? What about the more than 60 states that have called for a global cloning ban at the United Nations? Of course, some nations are on the other side. Chief among them is the UK, which has been pro the creation of embryos for research for 15 years; and the People’s Republic of China, and Singapore, and (after a narrow decision) Japan.

But we don’t need all the world to be on one side of this debate for a cloning ban to be the right thing for Missouri. What we do need is an awareness that “all scientists believe,” “enlightened opinion demands,” “business requires,” arguments are baloney. They have been rejected by progressive as well as conservative nations around the globe. The lawmakers of Missouri, listening to the conscience of their voters, need to make up their own mind. And they need to ban this unethical technology and declare that in this state, no human embryos will be created to be destroyed for use in experiments and medications.

Barbara Quigley is Executive Director of the St. Louis Center for Bioethics and Culture. Nigel M. de S. Cameron is President of the Institute on Biotechnology and the Human Future at Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology. He has represented the US as bioethics adviser at UN discussions of a convention to ban human cloning, but he writes here in his personal capacity.