No More Free Ride for the Cloning Bandwagon

...says Richard M. Doerflinger, Deputy Director of Pro-Life Activities at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), to a House subcommittee. He told the congressmen that there are "scientific, political, and moral lessons to be learned from this debacle" in South Korea.

“The political agenda for cloning has long been divorced from the facts,” he said. “To win public support and government funding, advocates for human cloning and ESC research have long made hyped claims and exaggerated promises to legislators and the public.”
. . .
“Therefore society, through instruments like the Nuremberg Code, has had to insist on moral absolutes such as ‘No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or a disabling injury will occur.’”

“What is new is the dominance of a ‘new ethic’ that justifies such abuses in principal—a utilitarian calculus that relativizes and demeans human life and other values if they get in the way of the research prize..."

Mr. Doerflinger's testimony, “Human Cloning and Embryonic Stem Cell Research after Seoul: Examining Exploitation, Fraud, and Ethical Problems in the Research” can be read in its entirety here.