Sweeping legislation promoting human cloning—in the guise of House Bill 1268—will once again go before the Senate Labor, Commerce, Research & Development Committee on Monday, March 28 (subject to change, according to state’s summary page).
This bill will certainly be a topic of conversation on Saturday’s Republican Radio, when Sound Politics’ own Marsha Richards interviews Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith. Smith will discuss human cloning and the Terri Schiavo case that has been grabbing so many national headlines. Richards will be interviewing Smith between 11:20am to Noon, with station lists and streaming audio available here.
HB 1268, which I last blogged about here, states that “[a]ny attempt to clone a human being is in direct conflict with the policies of this state.” But the bill engages in deception through political re-definition of terms. The context of the quoted sentence is a paragraph that re-defines “cloning of a human being” to simply mean cloning a human and bringing it all the way to birth. The bill also paves the way for fetal farming and the cloning of animal-human hybrids, among other things.
Last week, HB 1268 was the subject of a lengthy floor debate in the House of Representatives. The bill passed by a vote of 59-36. The House roll call vote is available through HB 1268’s summary page. Some courageous Representatives offered some amendments that would have made a horrible bill a little less horrible, but all of them failed.
Sadly, some of the only local coverage of the bill has focused upon some controversial statements made about the bill on the house floor. (See Wednesday’s article in The Olympian, here.) Why wasn't there coverage about the utter deception pertetrated by the now-dead Senate Bill 5594, which initially claimed to outlaw all human cloning? Why no serious attention to the possibility of fetal farming and other ethically problematic practices that HB 1268 seeks to promote?
In any case, I have not yet had a chance to listen to March 15 floor debate on HB 1268 (which is archived at TVW’s site, here). Those who are most interested in preventing the reduction of human life to a raw material for harvesting would do well to avoid making inflammatory analogies or bringing in extraneous issues into the debate. At bottom, the issue is this: should the laws of the state promote the creation of a class of human life that is targeted for destruction for medical experimentation or does human life have inherent worth and dignity that is worthy of respect?
My prior post also discusses the prevailing lack of understanding demonstrated by the Senate Committee members the last time they dealt with such cloning legislation. It will be interesting to see what they do this time around.
Going back to Smith and the Terri Schiavo case, be sure to check out his recent blog post at Secondhand Smoke concerning his Court TV debate with a bioethicist. Smith got the so-called bioethicist (heh) to agree that Terri’s organs should be subject to harvesting...
(Cross-blogged at Seth Cooper's personal blog.)
Posted by Seth Cooper at March 25, 2005 04:39 PM | Email ThisThis is getting disgusting.....
I have not heard of this vile Frankenstein mentality since Josef Mengele's horrific experiments in Auschwitz!
Anyone who wishes to see the similarity - simply do a google search on *Nazi Germany and Josef Mengele*.....
This stem call nonsense is bordering on the absurd! I haven't seen such an attempt at sanitizing grotesque and devious behavior since they started calling babies *lumps of tissue* in the womb and equating them to tumors! I guess it's not a far stretch for them to now consider *fetus farming* as a good thing.....(gross!)
This is sick stuff.
Posted by: Deborah on March 25, 2005 08:33 PMAre they concerned, or simply informing us as to their intent?
Posted by: singer on March 25, 2005 08:49 PMCaring human beings even afforded this class of non-human basic comforts...which were of course, to benefit the OWNER of his PROPERTY, not the non-human.
With a class of people so recently rationalized and brutalized by the very thought proposed in this bill---with divisions from that era still a dividing topic--
why would blacks, in particular, support (or not oppose) the breeding of a new generation of non-human for profit and servitude with "grave risks", legislatively approved, and overseen for their protection?
Posted by: singer on March 25, 2005 09:21 PMThere are becoming so many classes of not-fully human, not REALLY like us..it bothers me. Where do the fully human think our humanity ends?
If the boundaries for not-human keep expanding, the boundaries for who is human keep diminishing. That's so frightening to me.
Posted by: singer on March 25, 2005 09:58 PMI hate this bill, but I think your definition of human is pretty outlandish.
Posted by: sgmmac on March 26, 2005 07:13 AMWhen did the Republican party become so anamored with being the party of the know nothings. At this point I'm surprised you all don't try to argue that we never landed on the moon because that was just a fiendish plot of JFK and LBJ.
Posted by: JDB on March 26, 2005 10:49 AMI'm pro-choice. I am pretty horrified by some of the implications of this bill, however. I don't place a collection of about 150 cells on par with a sentient human being, but this still strikes me as cannibalism. And I hate the idea of providing an actual "moral" incentive for abortion ("Maybe my blastocyst can help someone who's sick.")
I'm also shocked that human cloning only carries a civil penalty. A $100,000 fine can be small change to a biomedical facility.
Posted by: ChrisW on March 26, 2005 10:58 AMSo it's who's doing the choosing that bothers you, not the choice itself.
I believe ALL human life is equally and inately valuable, and there's nothing scary or outlandish about that.
Posted by: singer on March 26, 2005 12:34 PMI appreciate your passion and your caution about ways society can devalue human life, but I can't follow the logic of equating all forms of life.
Though in a broad sense, I agree and would like to believe all life is equal (just like I'd like to believe it's possible to love everyone equally), I think when we get down to it, there are important distinctions.
The comparison of fetal farming to slavery or the African American experience will quickly take this debate down the same rabbit hole as the comparison with the Holocaust. People who feel a strong connection with their history will suddenly feel insulted--and I think rightfully so--because they'll think you're comparing their family members or ancestors to a group of cells in a test tube.
Do you really want to make this comparison? If you were faced with a choice of destroying 150 human cells or dunking a 12 year old boy in ice water and then scalding water until he passes out, which would you choose? The boy doesn't die--he just suffers. The cells don't suffer; they die. But I'd destroy the cells.
Posted by: ChrisW on March 26, 2005 02:22 PMI certainly can appreciate that everyone does not feel equally passionate given the same set of facts, which are foundational. Having passion isn't necessarily emotion gone amok. Logic is the ordered thought of sensual input. Emotion is how we proceed on that information. Both are important and equally necessary.
I do not feel this is an inflammatory analogy or extraneous issue but a logical conclusion based on reason and historical observance. Neither am I comparing the life experience of others to a cluster of cells. I'm pointing out the inherent value of each life, and the historically proven faulty philosophy of segregating people into "less valued" groups.
Interesting the choice you offer, as presented by you, is based solely on emotion. The boy is like us--he suffers. Put yourself in his shoes.The cells are not like us--they aren't worth as much.
In your choice, I would even then value both as LIFE, and triage the situation as to who could be saved in that circumstance. (Can the boy listen to instruction and save himself? Can I care for the cells?, etc.)
I don't want to hog the board. I'd like to hear from you and others
I don't know that I could do either. I would have to consider myself a POW and decide from there.
Posted by: singer on March 26, 2005 03:56 PMAnyway, definatley done posting here!
Posted by: singer on March 26, 2005 04:35 PMI guess we're the only ones posting now, so go ahead!
My scenario is ridiculous, I realize. We're never in that kind of position. But I did want to challenge things a bit. People are going to reduce this to personal choices, for better or worse. I like to think I appreciate life, but I appreciate certain people more than others. Watching my grandmother get ravaged with Alzheimers was pretty painful. If stem cells can be harvested before there's any chance of pain or self in the being being sacrificed, it's hard for me to walk away from that.
I'm also horrified by the idea of a brave new world in which human cells become a commodity.
Thanks for staying open with me for a while,
C
You both might review the following:
Human Personhood Begins at Conception, by Peter Kreeft, Catholic Educators Research Center, http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/abortion/ab0004.html
I found it to be a thought provoking scholarly analysis of contemporary arguments surrounding "Human Person-hood".
Posted by: Amused by liberals on March 29, 2005 11:01 AM