[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 30 (Tuesday, February 25, 2003)] [House] [Pages H1307-H1311] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov] HUMAN CLONING PROHIBITION ACT OF 2003 The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Weldon) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader. Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to address the House regarding the very important issue of human cloning. The question before our Nation is are we going to allow human cloning in the United States of America or are we going to ban human cloning? In the 107th Congress, I introduced legislation, the Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2001. This legislation ultimately was reviewed and passed approvingly after hearings by the Committee on the Judiciary and was brought to the floor of the House and received a favorable vote in the House of Representatives passing by a margin of 265 for, 162 against. Of note in that vote there were some 63 Democrats who voted in support of this legislation to ban all forms of human cloning. And I would point out that many of the Democrats who voted in support of banning human cloning were pro-choice. There are many people who have tried to define this debate about human cloning as liberal/conservative. They have tried to define it as a pro-life/pro-abortion rights kind of debate; but in reality the debate on human cloning transcends some of those traditional divisions that separate the political parties and factions within the House of Representatives and within our Nation. Unfortunately, the legislation to ban all forms of human cloning that passed overwhelmingly in the House of Representatives 2 years ago, almost 2 years ago now, it was never taken up by the Senate. The Senate never held a vote on the issue. Therefore, the issue was essentially left open; and, indeed, many Americans are shocked and surprised to learn today that there is no law on the books in the United States of America to ban human cloning. Indeed, many foreign countries have already moved, they have already acted to ban human cloning. Several European countries have banned it outright, like Germany, for example. Norway has banned it completely. The European Parliament has called for a complete ban on human cloning. The French Senate very recently voted to ban all forms of human cloning. So clearly there is a tide sweeping the globe that says, no, we are not going to move away from human pro- creation to baby manufacturing, which is really what this debate is all about in its essence. Due to the failure of the Senate, or the other body, to act on this issue, I reintroduced my legislation along with my colleague from Michigan (Mr. Stupak). Our bill is H.R. 534, the Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2003. And I would like to talk a little bit about what the legislation is and what it does, and I have a few visuals to help with this debate. First of all, I would like to start out with what is human cloning. In normal sexual reproduction, the sperm and the egg unite to form a single-cell embryo, and that single-cell embryo rapidly begins a process of dividing to form this multicell embryo. And, of course, from there it develops further into the fetal stage of development forming a baby and ultimately a human being like you and I. In human cloning we have a procedure called somatic cell nuclear transfer, and what happens here is you take a human egg and you either deactivate the nucleus in the egg or you remove it, and there are two different approaches to that. And you essentially end up with an egg that has no nuclear material in it. In a normal human egg, the normal cells in our bodies have 46 chromosomes; but in the egg there are 23 chromosomes and in the sperm there are 23, and they come together to form a new unique human being with 46 chromosomes. So in the process of cloning, you either deactivate this nucleus or you eject it out. So you end up with an enucleated egg. And then you take a cell from somebody's body, and in this depiction this has the appearance of a skin cell and you extract the nucleus out of that cell, and you place it inside the egg. And this is why it is called nuclear transfer. It is called somatic cell nuclear transfer because the cells in our bodies are called somatic cells or body cells. Somatic means body. And then what happens next is typically they zap this egg with a little bit of electricity, and lo and behold it begins to divide and form an embryo. This, of course, is the first mammal that was ever cloned. The first species that was cloned, I believe, it occurred in the 1950s. It was a carrot. But this creation of Dolly the sheep was the first example of a mammal being cloned. Prior to cloning Dolly, there had been some other vertebrates that were cloned, but Dolly was the first mammal. And, of course, we as humans are mammals. And the reason this created so much news is because Dolly a sheep, a mammal very similar to us, and what they did there was they took an udder, cell which is essentially a mammary duct cell, and they took the nucleus out of it from the donor sheep, and then they took another sheep and they took an egg from that sheep and removed the nucleus. And so they did the nuclear transfer technology, and so they had the DNA of this sheep in the egg from this sheep. They zapped it with electricity. They got it to grow in culture, and then they transplanted it into another female sheep. And this is, of course, the surrogate mother and Dolly was created. And here is Dolly depicted here. This sheep is a genetic duplicate of this sheep, the one that you took the nucleus out of. This sheep can be construed as the twin or this one can be construed as the twin of this sheep. Now, it is worth noting that Dolly was born on July 5, 1996. Almost immediately Dolly began to show signs of premature aging. Indeed, the researchers who have studied all the cloned mammals that have been cloned so far, pigs, goats, mice, they all show genetic defects in all of them. Dolly manifested early arthritis; and, of course, she had to be euthanized, or put to sleep, recently because of the development of further medical conditions. She essentially experienced half the normal life expectancy of a normal sheep. And this is one of the principle issues why many people feel that to do cloning in humans, as some people are proposing, is morally and ethically reprehensible. It took 237 attempts to create Dolly with many miscarriages, many sheep being born with very, very severe birth defects. So if we try to do this with humans, the question, of course, becomes how many humans will be born, how many babies will be born with birth defects? How will we take care of them? Who will be responsible for them? [[Page H1308]] {time} 2000 One of the most disturbing things about all this is if we were able to overcome those immediate birth-related problems, what would the life of a person who was cloned be like? Would they manifest premature aging? Would they ultimately succumb to diseases at an early age? This is clearly experimentation of the absolute worst and most reprehensible kind, and there is general agreement that we should outlaw cloning specifically of this type, referred to as reproductive cloning. What this House will engage in a tremendous amount of debate on over the next few days is the issue of whether or not we should allow something called therapeutic cloning or the creation of cloned embryos in the lab. I anticipate that there will be a substitute for my legislation being offered by the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Greenwood). His legislation contends that it is best to simply outlaw the creation of a human being but to allow the unfettered creation of human embryos in the lab to be exploited for research purposes because of the supposed great potential of these to lead to cures to many diseases. I know there are a lot of people who have some questions about this issue, and I would be very happy to yield to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Renzi), a distinguished freshman from the Flagstaff area. I understand he had some questions for me about this issue. Mr. RENZI. Mr. Speaker, I would like to engage the gentleman from Florida in a colloquy if he would not mind, please. Mr. WELDON of Florida. I would be happy to do that. Mr. RENZI. Mr. Speaker, I have seen and heard a lot of rhetoric, and recently we had a letter that was sent around by one of our colleagues that favors the research, if we can call it that, on behalf of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research. And I have got some serious questions and doubts as to the truth. One of our colleagues says that their position is reasonable, and his letter goes on to state that somatic cell nuclear transfer is not the science fiction you see in movies but, rather, a reasonable and appropriate way to alleviate the horror faced by patients suffering from deadly and painful disease. Pain and disease is something that all Americans are passionate about, and I would ask my colleague, then, what cures, in light of this great new technology, have occurred using somatic cell nuclear transfer, if he does not mind. Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I would be happy to respond to his question. This is a very, very important issue, and it gets essentially to the crux of the debate we are going to have here on the floor of this body on Thursday when H.R. 534 comes up for discussion, debate, and consideration and vote, and I want to just point out one very very important thing about this. They are trying to call embryo cloning somatic cell nuclear transfer, and the reason they are trying to do that, scientifically that is what it is, but the overwhelming majority of Americans are opposed to all forms of human cloning. It is something like 65, 70, 80 percent of the American people are against all forms of human cloning, and so they are trying to put a pretty face on it so they are calling it somatic cell nuclear transfer. The important point I want to raise I think was stated very nicely by the President's National Bioethics Advisory Commission back in 1997, and they said the commission began its discussion fully recognizing that any efforts in humans to transfer a somatic cell nucleus into an enucleated egg involves the creation of an embryo with the apparent potential to be planted in utero and developed to term. So what they are saying here is this is cloning. So they may want to call it somatic cell nuclear transfer but it is definitely cloning. They go on to say this is not science fiction you see in movies, but rather a reasonable and appropriate way to alleviate the horrors faced by patients suffering from deadly painful diseases. This kind of language in my opinion is reprehensible. There is no basis in science to make a claim like this, and I have been saying this over and over again. I would be very, very happy to debate these people who go around making these claims. Therapeutic cloning has never been done. It is going to be debated here as though it is a scientific fact. It is a scientific fiction. It has never been demonstrated in humans. What is more, it has never even been demonstrated in an animal model. We purchase from research labs these animals that are genetically programmed to develop diabetes. We cannot take this technology and use it to even cure an animal. The advocates for embryo cloning do not have even one, one, example of where in an animal model they can cure disease; and for them to go so far as to say this has the potential to alleviate the horrors faced by patients suffering from deadly diseases, I think it is a horror that they would make such a grossly exaggerated and false statement, because it raises the false hopes of millions of Americans who suffer from these diseases. There is no scientific evidence that this has the potential to be effective at this time. I apologize, this is a very, very long answer to the gentleman's question. But my legislation to ban cloning does not prohibit animal cloning, and it does not prohibit animal embryo cloning, and so the advocates for this will have unfettered ability to demonstrate that this works in animal models, and if they can demonstrate that it works in animal models, they can come back to the Congress and say we really feel very strongly that you need to allow this to move forward in human models, the Congress has the ability to reverse the law. But that is a grossly exaggerated claim. I understand the gentleman wanted to ask me some more questions in a colloquy. Mr. RENZI. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield? Mr. WELDON of Florida. I yield to the gentleman from Arizona. Mr. RENZI. Mr. Speaker, I take it then from the gentleman's answer that we have no proof that any cures to human beings, never mind even animals, exist; and by the chart the gentleman showed, it actually accelerates the aging of an animal and actually leads to faster death, then. So rather than cure life, it leads to a faster death. Could I respond also to a portion of the gentleman's statement as it relates to some of the break-throughs that have been claimed, and could I ask that the gentleman look at a piece from a letter that was also recently sent around, and I quote: Cloning is widely used. It is widely used. It is a vital medical tool that has allowed scientists and researchers to develop powerful new drugs, produce insulin, useful bacteria in the lab, track the origins of biological weapons, catch criminals, and free innocent people. It even produces new plants and livestock to help feed and nourish the poor of our world. In addition to wanting to alleviate pain and suffering, I consider myself a compassionate American who wants to help save our world, and it sounds like cloning is going to do just that. The gentleman's bill, of course, would not ban this type of cloning that was going to save our world, would it? Mr. WELDON of Florida. This is a very confusing quote because it really mixes two issues. It starts out saying cloning is a widely used, vital medical tool that has allowed scientists and researchers to develop powerful new drugs. What they are talking about is we have been cloning tissues in the labs for years, we have been cloning animals in the labs for years, we have been cloning DNA in the lab, and some of these cloning technologies are finding their way into the research and development arenas that are used for development of new drugs, produce insulin, useful bacteria in the lab. And so those statements are true. But my bill does not ban those things. This group, CAMR, or the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research, they are against my bill; but in that response they fail to point out that my bill does not ban all of that animal cloning and all of that DNA cloning, all that stuff that is going on. What it specifically only bans is human cloning, an attempt to create a human embryo in the lab, and they seem to imply in the first sentence of that quote the gentleman just read that it is a vital medical tool. Those applications that would be permissible under my legislation are certainly vital, and they will proceed unfettered, [[Page H1309]] but human cloning is not a vital medical tool. There is not one research article where human cloning has been used to treat anybody of anything. Might I also add, the crux of this debate is the whole issue of regenerative medicine and if a person gets sick, the traditional tools used by physicians are surgery and medications to make a person well; and of course there is therapy and there are lots of other modalities to make people well. But an additional tool is this concept of regenerative medicine where we take cells and put cells in a person's body and those cells make a person better, and adults themselves have actually been used in 45 human clinical trials to make people well. Embryonic stem cells have never been used in a single clinical trial to ever make anybody well. Embryo stem cells have never been used in an animal model to heal an animal. There have been a couple of studies that seem to suggest that embryo stem cells might have some potential at some point in the future, but they do not have a model where we can take an animal with disease and make it well, and that is what they are trying to imply by this response. Again, it is a very deceptive response, and I apologize for these lengthy responses to the gentleman's inquiries. These issues are just very, very complicated science, and it is very hard to do them justice by just giving 8-second sound-bite responses to the questions. Mr. RENZI. The letter that the gentleman and I are discussing and the portions of the letter and the quotes that we have gone over together, this letter from the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research; has the gentleman seen the quote which addresses the leading scientists and even two prestigious committees on the National Academy of Sciences that have agreed that cloning to reproduce humans should be illegal but that somatic cell nuclear transfer or therapeutic cloning should be permitted? My question is that it is my understanding that these panels included no bioethics experts and even that they considered the ethical debate, the morality in question, to be something that should be left up for others to debate. Mr. WELDON of Florida. That is absolutely correct. The National Academy of Sciences panel made that recommendation, but then they acknowledged there were no bioethicists on the panel, and then they went on further to state that others should debate the ethics of this. There were no bioethicists. There were no theologians. There were no elected representatives from the people, no representatives from the community. And they wisely said that others should debate the morality and the ethics of this issue; and frankly, they wisely said that because the path that they are recommending that we allow the creation of human life in the lab for research purposes and then those human embryos are to be destroyed is an entirely new path for us to walk down. {time} 2015 Historically in our Nation we have always stood up for protecting life. The recent historical departure from that, Roe v. Wade, that decision was rendered in the context, at least my understanding of the interpretation of the decision of the court was not that the baby developing inside the woman is not alive and not that it is not human and not that it is a commodity that can just be manipulated and discarded, but that the right of reproductive freedom or privacy of the mother trumped the right to life of the baby, a decision I do not particularly agree with. But now we are talking about going in a whole new direction. We are talking about creating life expressly for the purpose of exploiting it and destroying it. A parallel would be for a woman to deliberately try to get pregnant so she could have an abortion. Clearly this is a moral and ethical quagmire that I do not think we should walk down as a Nation. I will just cite for you one example of where this would lead us if we allow therapeutic cloning or embryo cloning. The artificial womb is available to us today. You can take a mammalian embryo and drop it in the artificial womb, and it will pass from the embryonic stage into the fetal stage of development and can survive up to 30 days of development. That will be the next place these researchers will want to go to. Who on Earth would want to extract stem cells from an embryo and try to grow those embryo stem cells into, let us say you want heart tissue. Why would you want to go through the ordeal of in a petri dish trying to grow those cells into heart tissue when you could just much more cheaply and easily place that embryo into an artificial womb and then come back 2 weeks or 3 weeks later and get the tissue you want out of it? That is the slippery slope we are going down. So it is a moral and ethical minefield that I think we as a Nation should not enter into, and we should ban all forms of human cloning. Mr. RENZI. I wanted to ask, we have got a good colleague within our own party who has addressed also this subject matter. Could I ask if you are aware or do you know if the Greenwood bill would ban human reproductive cloning? Mr. WELDON of Florida. Actually, I do not know if the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Greenwood) is going to change his language before it comes to the floor, but the language as I last saw it, it is not actually a ban. It is a moratorium. It is a 10-year moratorium on reproductive cloning, taking the cloned embryo and putting it in the uterus of a surrogate mother for the purpose of creating a child. It is a 10-year moratorium. It essentially is saying we do not think this is something we want to allow for the next 10 years, but in 10 years we may want to allow reproductive cloning. So I do not think it is a true ban. The other point I want to mention, and I have debated my good friend, the gentleman from Pennsylvania, on this issue many times in the past, a reproductive-only ban is very, very difficult to enforce. Indeed, I have a quote from the Justice Department I am going to put up on the easel here in a minute where they state categorically it is going to be very, very hard to enforce. If you allow research cloning to proliferate all over the country, you are going to have dozens of labs producing human embryos for experimental research purposes. It would be very, very easy for an unscrupulous, dishonest physician to do this. I am a physician and I know as a fact that not every physician is an honest person. The medical profession draws its ranks from the human race and there are people who do bad things even within the medical profession. It will be very easy for an unscrupulous physician to implant one of those human embryos into a woman in the privacy of the doctor-patient relationship, and it would be impossible for our Justice Department to police such a thing and prevent it from happening. Indeed, if a physician did that and a baby were to develop, what could the government do at that point? They certainly would not mandate an abortion on a woman like that. And so I feel very, very strongly that the Feinstein-Hatch-type approach in the other body or the Greenwood approach would actually help usher in reproductive cloning, the very thing that they say they want to prohibit. Mr. RENZI. I would like to go back to the letter that the Coalition for Medical Research has put out. There is an interesting quote also in the body of that letter that addresses somatic cell nuclear transfer as being, quote, ``a research technique to develop cells that can be used to treat or cure chronic and degenerative diseases and disorders.'' They claim the process has nothing to do with sexual reproduction and that its sole purpose is research to meet unmet medical needs. The way I read this, sir, it sounds to me like we are not creating human embryos. Where are we? Are we creating human embryos, or are we not creating human embryos? Mr. WELDON of Florida. Here again what they are trying to do is change the terminology. They have been losing the debate on this issue with the hearts and minds of the American people, so they are now trying to call it somatic cell nuclear transfer rather than embryo cloning or therapeutic cloning. When they called it those things, people understood exactly what it is. But when they say somatic cell nuclear transfer, suddenly people do not know what they are talking about and they may be able to get this thing through. [[Page H1310]] Clearly as a scientist, as a physician, I can tell you that you are talking about creating human embryos, there is no two ways around it, with the potential to develop into a human being. That is not only my opinion; it is the opinion of the Bioethics Advisory Commission. The same commission has a number of members who feel that therapeutic cloning or embryo cloning should be permissible, but they readily recognize that as soon as you take a somatic cell nucleus and put it in an enucleated egg, it involves the creation of an embryo with the apparent potential to be implanted in a uterus and developed to term. It is the procedure used to create Dolly. So to try to say it is not, I think, is misleading. The facts are the facts. Mr. RENZI. The fact being, then, that they are creating human life, they are exploiting a human embryo, and that they are using this term ``somatic cell nuclear transfer'' as a new terminology to come back in and try and legalize or try and establish human cloning as being something that should be legal in America. Could I ask, please, the Coalition for Medical Research that we are discussing talks about moving stem cell research forward and that somatic cell nuclear transfer could bring new hope to nearly 1 million Americans suffering from, and now we move to the type of diseases which really tug at the heart strings of America. They are citing cancer would be cured, Alzheimer's, diabetes, hepatitis, Parkinson's disease. The only thing left off here is AIDS. And so I would ask you, is this not similar to the type of promises that we saw 10 years ago when we were debating fetal tissue research, the idea that that would bring us all the type of breakthroughs that would cure what ails our human population? Are we not seeing the same sort of propaganda? Are we not seeing the same sort of promises where in over 10 years since fetal tissue research, we really have seen very little, if at all, any kind of great scientific breakthroughs? Mr. WELDON of Florida. The gentleman raises an absolutely important point. That is, the debates that they are bringing up here were the same exact debates 10 years ago on fetal tissue research. One of the amazing aspects of all this is Senator Hatch was one of the people who led the charge against fetal tissue research in the other body 10 years ago, and now today he is leading the charge to allow embryo cloning, which is a great irony for me. As I mentioned to you before, there is no basis in science to make a claim like that. I find it very reprehensible for them to hold out hopes to millions and millions of Americans that this is going to be the cure for their condition. I will simply just point out, if that were the case, if this statement were true, you would go into the research labs at Harvard and Yale and UCLA and all the prestigious medical schools throughout the Nation and I would expect all the research scientists to be working on cloning, but in point of fact they are not. The reason they are not is because this is a bogus, absurd statement. There is no evidence in science that substantiates a claim like this, that you are going to be able to cure all these millions of Americans of all of these diseases. I will just simply point out a very important point that they fail to mention. If that were the case, where would you get all the eggs to do all this? It took dozens and dozens of eggs to create Dolly. If you come down with one of these diseases they describe here, we cannot necessarily cure you with one egg. We might need a dozen eggs to get one good clone of you that might develop into an embryo. By the way, this is all science fiction, this is not real; but this is what they are claiming. You would literally need billions of eggs. Who is going to donate all these eggs? To get the eggs, to get a woman's egg, you have to give a woman powerful drugs that cause a phenomenon called superovulation, so instead of one egg developing you get a dozen eggs developing. The drugs have side effects. Thirty percent of women who take those drugs develop depression. You have to give them these powerful drugs, and then you have to give them a general anesthetic and do a surgical procedure to harvest the eggs. This is not some simple, minor procedure that you can have done in a medical office in 30 seconds. You are talking about an ordeal for a woman to donate her eggs. And for them to make the absurd notion that you are going to cure 100 million Americans with this, you would literally need 1 billion eggs. Mind you, they do not have one, one example where they can do one of these things in an animal model. Not one. I have challenged some of the most prestigious scientists in the world with this question. Show me one, one article where you can do this in a human. None. I say show me one article, one research article, a peer-reviewed journal article where you can do this in an animal model. None. They have absolutely none. But they make these bald-faced, absurd assertions that they are going to cure 100 million people with all these conditions. I think it is shameful that they would seriously consider this. I very much appreciate the opportunity to engage in this colloquy with the gentleman. Mr. RENZI. I am grateful, sir. I want to congratulate and applaud the gentleman from Florida for his substantive argument tonight based on fact. There is not a lot of emotional rhetoric there. It is truly your research that contains the truth and not their research which contains false hopes and, I believe, propaganda. I would like to mention that the lobbyists who cloak themselves in the guise of medical research do an injustice and mislead our American public. It is you who play upon our American compassion to help those in pain and relieve those in suffering in order that you may promote an immoral agenda. The morality argument has been made much tonight, but it is you who want to create human life in a petri dish only to genetically engineer it to die 14 days later. This is not medical research. This is you scientists creating defective human American life and that is mutant life. I abhor your objectives in order that you might bring prestige to yourself. I urge my colleagues to reject those scientists who lack the wisdom to recognize human life in favor of garnering international acclaim among their peers for their morbid scientific breakthroughs. Mr. WELDON of Florida. I thank the gentleman. It has certainly been a pleasure to engage in this colloquy. I would be very happy to recognize the gentlewoman from Colorado and yield to her if she would like to say a few words about this very important issue. Mrs. MUSGRAVE. I thank the gentleman. I certainly yield to the gentleman in regard to the clinical objections that you have raised and with all of your knowledge of medical issues raised in regard to human cloning. However, I would like to rise to speak to the profound moral issues raised when we consider permitting medical science to create human life for the exclusive purpose of experimentation and destruction. I think that we need to look to human history. It is a truth of history that governments and mankind, if given the opportunity under the law, will trample on human life. {time} 2030 History is strewn with such examples. By legalizing human cloning for any reason, and many of them can sound altruistic even if they are false, we open a Pandora's box which could set our civilization on a similar course. It is morally wrong to create human life, even nascent human life, for the purpose of experimentation and destruction. Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman, and those were very well taken points. This is clearly a line in the sand. It is a demarcation point; and if we go across that line, if we say we are going to start creating human lives for the purpose of exploiting them for scientific research and then discarding them, where does that take us next? What comes around the corner? I have been arguing for years that it will usher in reproductive cloning. Indeed, in testimony that we received in my committee, we had a Dr. Cohen, Brian Cohen, who represented the American Society of Reproductive Medicine; and in his testimony he repeatedly said ``We are opposed to reproductive cloning at this time,'' and he said it twice. Finally I asked him, ``Why did you say `We are opposed to reproductive cloning at this time'?'' And this fellow represents the Association of Fertility Experts in the United [[Page H1311]] States, and essentially his response to me was that once all the science is worked out on this where it can be done safely, they want to be able to do it. They want to be able to clone human beings. And this is the brave new world, no longer confined to fiction literature, but it has essentially arrived because the follow-ons to this will be genetic manipulation, genetic enhancements. Eugenetics is what it is called, an attempt to try to eliminate undesirable traits in our culture and our society. So people will begin to not only select the gender of their desired offspring, but they may actually want to manipulate the genetic code of their offspring so they can get a specific height or size or physical appearance or IQ. I would imagine athletic performance will be one of the things that they will go after. And this is the Pandora's box of issues that we are opening up if we allow human cloning to occur in the United States. Therapeutic cloning, embryo cloning or reproductive cloning, it is the path we are going down. And I just want to underscore the importance of us banning all forms of human cloning, which is what we are able to do in the Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2003, and I just want to again underscore that there are people who are going to try to put lipstick on the pig. They are going to try to say that this is not cloning; and they are going to call it somatic cell nuclear transfer, or they are going to try to call it nuclear transfer technologies; and we are going to hear this kind of language being used both in this body and the other body. It is cloning. It is creating human embryos through the process of cloning. And people need to remember that no matter what they call it, that is what it is. I just want to underscore additionally that this is not purely a pro- life issue. Cloning of all types, therapeutic, embryonic, and reproductive cloning, has been made illegal in Germany by the leadership of the Green Party, which is pro-choice. Indeed, in the vote that we had passing my bill in the 107th Congress, I had seven or eight people voting for the legislation who had a 100 percent voting record with the National Abortion Rights Action League. And so clearly this is not an abortion debate. It is different from that. There are a lot of people who are pro-life like myself who have a very strong moral and ethical objection to cloning on the basis of simply creating human life in the lab to be exploited and destroyed, a so-called utilitarian approach. But there are many people on the left who are strongly opposed to cloning because of their concern about eugenics, because of their concern about the impact this could have on the disability community, and very importantly there are a lot of people who are very concerned about the exploitation of women. If we are going to have in this country dozens of labs creating hundreds of human embryos every year for the purpose of doing research, where are we going to get those eggs from? Who is going to donate their eggs? Who will submit themselves to this kind of research? I will say who I think it will be. It will probably be poor women. It will probably be predominantly women of color. Indeed, I want to read this quote from Judy Norsigian. She is the co- author of ``Our Bodies, Ourselves for the New Century,'' the Boston Women's Health Collective book, hardly a right wing group. What does she say? ``Because embryo cloning will compromise women's health, turn their eggs and wombs into commodities, compromise their reproductive autonomy, and with virtual certainty lead to the production of experimental human beings, we are convinced that the line must be drawn here.'' And I was very encouraged by this latter part of her quote. She is not only concerned about women being exploited, but she has a concern about the dignity, the human dignity, and the indignity of this to be creating human beings for experimental research purposes and then to be discarded. If research cloning is allowed to proceed in this country, or therapeutic cloning unfettered, in my opinion what ultimately will happen, because it will be so expensive to get these eggs from women in the United States because they will have to pay women thousands of dollars to undergo the procedure, because of the fairly high incidence of depression in women who take these superovulatory drugs, we may have women requiring hospitalization following the egg donation procedure or maybe even going so far as attempting suicide, what I think they will end up doing is they will end up going to third world countries. They will end up going to Central America, South America, away from the trial attorneys in the United States that can lead to lawsuits, away from the prying eyes of the American press and where they can pay women peanuts in order to get their eggs; and that I think is one of the concerns of people like Judy Norsigian. She knows that ultimately the potential exists for women to be exploited, and that is just shameful that it would happen when there is no evidence that this could even work in animals. Indeed, the evidence, there was just recently an article in the mouse model where they tried to do therapeutic cloning and it did not work. The other thing I want to just share is this quote from Daniel Bryant, who is the Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legislative Affairs. He says ``enforcing a modified cloning ban would be problematic and pose certain law enforcement challenges that would be lessened with an outright ban on human cloning. Anything short of an outright ban would present other difficulties to law enforcement. And what he is talking about here is if we take the approach advocated by the form of the legislation being promoted by the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Greenwood) in the House and Senators Hatch and Feinstein in the other body, just a reproductive ban, how will we enforce that? It will be impossible to enforce that. We will have all of these embryos in all of these labs. The Justice Department, police officers cannot monitor these labs regularly to make sure the embryos have been discarded rather than implanted in women. There will be no way to know whether or not reproductive cloning has occurred. So I feel very, very strongly that this is the best way for us to go. I will also point out that the President has indicated that he wants a complete ban on all forms of human cloning, reproductive and so- called therapeutic cloning. So clearly, the time has arrived. It is critical that we as a Nation do the right thing. I believe the House of Representatives will do the right thing and ban human cloning in all of its forms, both embryonic cloning and so-called reproductive cloning, that all attempts at creating human embryos in the lab will be prohibited. This is an enforceable ban and a lasting ban. The advocates who say that we must allow embryo cloning in the lab because of its great potential to lead to cures of all these diseases, I again issue my challenge, show me the evidence. Traditionally in this country we always have demonstrated that it works in animals before we attempt it in humans. Show us the evidence in the scientific literature that this works in animals. They cannot. They will not be able to. The reason they cannot is because it cannot be done. It has not been done in human models. Clearly this takes us down a very dangerous and precarious path, creating human life for the purpose of exploiting it and then destroying it. A very dangerous road for us to walk as a Nation. So I would encourage all of my colleagues to vote in support of the ban on human cloning that we will be debating in the House of Representatives. ____________________