The Wisconsin State Assembly voted late Thursday to place a complete ban on human cloning in the state. Assembly Bill 499 would ban both "reproductive cloning" where a cloned person is brought to birth, and "therapeutic cloning" where a cloned person is killed in the name of scientific progress.
"We commend the Wisconsin State Assembly for placing a total ban on the destructive and dehumanizing practice of human cloning," said Peggy Hamill, state director of Pro-Life Wisconsin. "We especially thank Representative Kestell for his courageous and steadfast leadership in passing this critical bill intact."
On a 59 to 38 vote, Assembly Bill 499, authored by State Representative Steve Kestell
(R-Elkhart Lake), passed the Assembly and will now move to the State Senate. Senator Joe Leibham (R-Sheboygan) is the lead Senate author of the bill.
"All human cloning results in the creation of a new living human embryo that, while genetically identical to another person, is a distinct human life," said Matt Sande, Pro-Life Wisconsins director of legislative affairs. "Proponents of so-called therapeutic cloning hide this reality by resorting to verbal games. They say they oppose human cloning but support somatic cell nuclear transfer or SCNT, hoping no one will understand that SCNT is simply the scientific name for the cloning procedure. They even say that they support cloning only to produce stem cells, evading the fact that they must create and then destroy fully human embryos to produce those stem cells," said Sande.
An effort to amend the bill to permit therapeutic cloning while outlawing reproductive cloning was handily defeated. Referred to as clone to kill, an exclusive ban on reproductive cloning would mandate that all cloned human embryos be killed since it would prohibit the placement of cloned embryos in wombs.
A clone to kill law would create a new crime: the crime of initiating a pregnancy with a cloned human embryo, said Sande. Will the law then mandate an abortion, the destruction of a born child, or imprisonment of the mother and child? The only thing that an exclusive ban on reproductive cloning would do is ban the survival of someone created by cloning. It would be worse than doing nothing at all.
The states of Michigan, Iowa, Indiana, Arkansas, North and South Dakota have all passed comprehensive bans on human cloning, prohibiting both reproductive and therapeutic cloning.
Source: Pro-Life Wisconsin
