Professor Quits to Begin Cloning Humans and Aborting Failed Attempts
WASHINGTON (LSN.ca) – One of the two promoters of reproductive human cloning who gave testimony before a U.S. government committee last week left her teaching job to begin her cloning experiments.
Dr. Brigitte Boisselier, a visiting chemistry professor at Hamilton College in upstate New York, resigned last week “to focus full-time on her work in cloning,” said school spokesman Michael Debraggio.
In an interview with the New York Post Boisselier, scientific director of Clonaid, said she will go ahead with plans to do the cloning in the United States unless the Food and Drug Administration intervenes. Clonaid is a biotechnology firm operated by a cult known as the Raelians which believes that humans were cloned by extraterrestrials.
Meanwhile, scientists involved in cloning animals told the committee that due to its extremely low success rate cloning is currently indefensible for humans. “At least half, probably about three-quarters, of pregnancies that are generated will be lost,” predicted Jonathan Hill, a veterinarian and assistant professor of animal reproduction at Cornell University.
Mark Westhusin, associate professor of veterinary science at Texas A&M University, who has successfully cloned cattle said, “The biggest problem is maintaining the pregnancy,” noting that about 90 percent of the embryos die in first trimester. Hill also pointed out that even if the clones make it to birth they are often abnormal. “Their livers, their lungs, their heart, the blood vessels, their placental vessels, and the placenta are often abnormal at birth,” he said.
Despite the warnings, Boisselier said she hopes to have a cloned human embryo “by the end of this month or maybe next month.” She said 50 members of the movement have volunteered to carry the clone of a dead 10-month-old boy. One of these women is Boisselier's daughter, Marina Cocolios, 24.
Boisselier made a convincing argument by comparing cloning to in vitro fertilization. If in vitro is permitted, the option to cloning humans is hardly unthinkable. CNN reports that she admitted there could be some problems with cloning, as with any in vitro pregnancy, and if something does go wrong, she said, “we will anticipate to do an abortion.”
(This update is a courtesy of LifeSite Daily News.)
by Gary Bauer
There was an extraordinary and deeply disturbing interview with Pat Robertson on CNN Monday night. Wolf Blitzer asked Robertson about China's policy of forcing Chinese women pregnant with a second child to have an abortion. This policy is repugnant and a radical violation of the most basic human rights. But here is what Robertson had to say:
“Well, you know, I don't agree with it (forced abortions). But at the same time, they've got 1.2 billion people, and they don't know what to do. If every family over there was allowed to have three or four children, the population would be completely unsustainable…. So I think right now they're doing what they have to do. I don't agree with the forced abortion, but I don't think the United States needs to interfere with what they're doing internally in this regard.”
Pro-abortion groups here in the U.S. must be popping champagne bottles this morning to toast their good fortune. And I am sure the tyrants in Beijing are pleased too. The pro-abortion side often argues the need to control population growth as an excuse for taking the lives of innocent unborn children, not to mention your tax dollars. Now they have a clear statement by a Christian leader embracing that concept. You can bet this quote will be heard time and time again in the upcoming congressional and
cultural debates on the sanctity of human life.
