Nigel Cameron Reports on the UN's
Cloning Decision
(reprinted
with permission from tothesource.com)
We Live In Amazing Times. Here
are some headlines you did NOT
see a few days ago: "Pro-family
Activists Support Key Women's Rights
Issue", "Germany Joins Forces
With the US Against the UK", "Key
Islamic States Follow the Vatican's Lead",
"Developing Nations Ally With the US
and Russia To Oppose Global Lobbying By
the Biotech Industry and its Scientist
Allies".
I wonder why? They
would all have made great headlines.
They are even true. And they give us
some of the best news we have had in a
long time.
Of course, at the
same time they would break open one of
the favorite stereotypes of the press:
that anyone who opposes “therapeutic
cloning” is a pro-life nut, and that the
only reason President Bush opposes it is
that he is under their power.
But Russia? Saudi
Arabia? African and Pacific island
states? Germany?
GERMANY?
What is this dirty
little secret that the press has labored
to keep quiet?
The legal committee
of the United Nations General Assembly
has voted for a declaration that calls
on the nations of the world to ban all
human cloning – for whatever purpose.
The vote still needs
to be sustained in the full General
Assembly, but because the legal
committee is a committee of the whole
(all the nations are represented) its
own vote is big news.
After several years
of proposals, delays, votes, and more
votes, we have a decision. And it’s a
very good decision.
True, “declarations”
do not have binding force. In the first
place, discussion focused on whether the
UN could agree on a “convention,” which
is a kind of treaty that nations sign
onto (if they choose) and are then
obliged to write into their own laws.
But since conventions are voluntary
(like the Kyoto convention on global
warming: no-one is obliged to sign it),
the difference between a convention and
a declaration is not as big as its
critics (like the UK) have already begun
to claim. One of the most famous
documents of the 20th century is the
UN’s Universal Declaration on Human
Rights.
Make no mistake, this
cloning declaration is big news. Because
it tells the world that biotechnology is
an ethical issue, and that the huge
lobbying efforts of biotech companies
and celebrities who want to clone human
embryos by the millions for experiments
and death has not succeeded. However,
they have brought efforts to ban cloning
in federal law to a stalemate. The
Senate may yet pass the Weldon-Brownback
cloning ban, though despite its huge
success in the House it has been
stalled.. But there are other places
where big biotech money does not get in
the way of democracy quite so easily.
Another reason the UN
cloning ban is big news is this: it
includes a ringing declaration of the
rights of women in the face of demands
by corporate biotech and the customers
they serve. And while feminist activists
have often found themselves opposing
pro-lifers on abortion at the UN, this
time something strange has happened.
Some women’s rights
campaigners have been glad to side with
pro-lifers on cloning - for a simple
reason. Advocates of “therapeutic
cloning” always gloss over one key
requirement of their planned embryo
experiments: the eggs. Cloning makes
embryos without sperm, but it does not
make them without eggs.
It has been
calculated that it could take 100 human
eggs to get one human embryo clone for
an experiment. That means it will take
hundreds of millions of women to provide
the eggs needed for “therapeutic
cloning” to provide the one-on-one
medications that have been promised –
for example, in the notorious speech of
Ron Reagan, Jr., to the Democratic
Convention last fall.
Women’s advocates may
not oppose embryonic stem cell research
using spare in vitro embryos, but they
are very unhappy about having women
super-ovulate so they can be the egg
factories for experimenters, biotech
corporations, and wealthy consumers
wanting their "own personal medical
toolkit".
That’s one reason why
Judy Norsigian, famed editor of the
pro-choice healthcare book Our Bodies,
Ourselves, signed the rebuttal to
California’s Prop. 71 (which allocated
$6 billion to cloning and stem cell
research). It explains why around the
world many nations that allow abortion
do not want to allow biotech
corporations to buy poor women’s eggs
wholesale.
So feminists have
been pressing to control these new
technologies, and the UN Declaration
passed by the legal committee includes a
clause that sets out their concern: in
section (d) "Member States are called
upon to take measures to prevent the
exploitation of women in the
applications of life sciences".
If and when the
American press does get around to
reporting on this vote in the United
Nations, it will have to come clean on
the whole story.
I wonder how many
California voters who backed Prop. 71
knew that “therapeutic cloning” is a
serious crime in many parts of the
world? And I don’t just mean Catholic
countries where human life is taken more
seriously than in others. I mean in
Canada. And Australia. And Germany,
where they know a thing or two about
unethical science.
Even FRANCE!
Last July France made
“therapeutic cloning” a felony. Do it
there and you will get seven years in
jail.
Strange bedfellows at
the UN have blazed the trail for cloning
bans around the world. Let’s work to get
this news out in the media of our
communities.
Nigel M. de. S.
Cameron, Ph.D. is Chairman of the Center
for Bioethics and Culture Network
