President George W. Bush issued an executive order on August 9, 2001, limiting federal funding for research on human embryos to stem cell lines taken from embryos who had already been killed prior to that date. That decision was, in our opinion, seriously flawed in that it opened the door to acceptance of research, currently underway and funded with private money that involves the killing of living human embryos. The restriction on taxpayer funding has placed an obstacle in the path of those in the biomedical and biotech industries who, despite the total absence of successful treatments, cures or therapies using embryonic stem cells, and despite the great successes resulting from the use of non-embryonic stem cells, are eager to get their hands on vast sums of taxpayer’s money for immoral and unethical experiments that kill living human beings.

The Specter – Harkin bill, with the help of Senator Hatch, would accomplish that.

Hatch To Re-Introduce Clone-To-Kill Bill 
Senator Hatch, in the same statement, announced his intention to re-introduce the “Hatch-Feinstein bill” (PDF file) that would “allow vital research to proceed using the technique of somatic cell nuclear transfer . . . .”

Somatic cell nuclear transfer is cloning! It is the technique through which Dolly the sheep was engendered. It involves the use of an egg from (in Dolly’s case) a female sheep. The nucleus containing most of the DNA was removed from the egg. The nucleus was replaced with the nucleus of a somatic cell (any human cell other than a sperm or egg cell) containing the DNA from the sheep to be cloned. Cell replication was induced through electrical stimulation. The new sheep embryo was then implanted into the uterus of the female sheep, which later gave birth to Dolly, the clone. This is the primary technique through which scientists think human beings could be cloned.

The Hatch-Feinstein bill would permit the cloning of human embryos but would allow them to live for no more than two weeks when it would require that the embryos be killed and their cells used for research.

The name of the Hatch-Feinstein bill, The Human Cloning Ban and Stem Cell Research Protection Act of 2003 is designed to conceal its real purpose. The bill bans the uterine implantation of a cloned human being. It doesn’t ban human cloning! On the contrary, it allows human cloning to take place and requires that the cloned embryo be killed prior to implantation.

Claiming the ostensibly altruistic motive of “defeating death and disease” through the use of stem cells from human embryos, he would make it legal to create human beings in order to kill and use them for the perceived benefit of others. Even the United Nations is more pro-life than Senator Hatch and his Senate co-sponsors. Senator Hatch has become a party to and leader in the anti-life agenda of those who would control the destiny of mankind. Even the United Nations is more pro-life than Senator Hatch and his Senate co-sponsors.

United Nations Calls On All Nations to Ban Human Cloning 
A United Nations declaration passed by the UN’s legal committee on Friday, February 18, 2005, calls on member states “to prohibit all forms of human cloning inasmuch as they are incompatible with human dignity and the protection of human life.” The vote came after three years of deadlock between a group of countries, led by Costa Rica, which wanted to end all cloning, and a group led by Belgium, that wanted to permit human clones to be created for the purpose of destroying them in research. (Culture of Life Foundation; Culture & Cosmos, 2/22/05)

Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) plans to re-introduce legislation in the Senate to ban human cloning very soon.