Is an Embryo Human?
Q: As a matter of objective, scientific fact, it would be as incorrect to say a baby isn't a human being as it would be to say that an embryo isn't a human being?
Weldon: Yes, all you've said is objective fact.
Q: During the stem cell debate, when Sen. Orrin Hatch [R.-Utah] emerged as the champion of people who favored killing frozen embryos for their stem cells, he argued that an embryo didn't become a human life until implantation in the womb?
Weldon: It was a rather unique argument that did not seem to have much consensus behind it. I thought Sen. Hatch had pulled this out of thin air from his own meditations on the issue.
Q: If you accepted his premise and you created an artificial machine that would gestate a human embryo, then wouldn't it be true, using his logic, that you could bring a baby fully to term, to birth, and yet that baby would not be a human life because it never had implanted in a uterus?
Weldon: You've pointed out not the only flaw in the senator's logic, but you've certainly pointed out a good one.
Q: What if someone says I want to clone a human person and implant it in a normal womb, in a woman, and have the baby carried to term, born and raised by two loving parents? What's wrong with that?
Weldon: I think it brings up multiple issues. Number one, you are creating a human being that is not your daughter or your son, but your sibling, your twin sibling. And you're bringing it forward not by sexual reproduction, naturally, and there are certain hazards associated with that. There is the potential for genetic defects it took 277 attempts to create Dolly. Dolly has developed early arthritis. You could produce a human being that would age much more rapidly.
Another big problem is, who wants to be a clone? Most of us like to know we're a unique human being, the first and last of the kind to ever have existed.
There are many other moral and ethical questions raised. Namely, why are you doing it in the first place? You have in vitro fertilization, you have adoption, why the need to clone? Being that it's not technically feasible at the moment, it is experimentation on human subjects. I've had people ask why it shouldn't be done if we can work through the technical problems. But to get through those technical problems you would have to do a lot of experimentation on human subjects.
Q: Don't you eventually come to an unavoidable moral question? The people who founded this country said all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” the right to life being first among those. Don't we believe as Americans that God not man is the author of life? In deciding whether to vote for or against legalized human cloning, won't legislators have to take a stand on that question one way or the other?
Weldon: You are getting at the very issue of why I am doing this. The Pandora's box here is huge. If we start to open it, the ramifications could be almost endless.
Leon Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, is very good at ticking off these things. The artificial womb is one. Will procreation move from a woman's body to a laboratory? The potential is really there for us to arrive at a place like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Will genes be modified to give people higher IQs or eliminate the tendency to be overweight? Will we inadvertently introduce disastrous abnormalities into the human gene pool? Will we introduce abnormalities that lead to new diseases that afflict the human race?
Hey Bud, Spare an Embryo?
Q: What happened to the option of using “spare” frozen embryos for stem cell research?
Weldon: The problem with using cells from excess embryos frozen in fertility clinics is that those embryos differ genetically from would-be recipients. A patient's body might reject marrow made from them. That's why they went to the cloning option: We'll just make a clone of you and use your “own” cells!
The problem with this theory and that makes it science fiction is that you can't make a clone of you until you get an egg cell from someone else. And it turns out that even after the nucleus is removed from a donated egg it still retains the mitochondria of the mother. The mitochondria generate the energy for the cell. These mitochondria also cause certain proteins to be expressed on the surface of the cell.
There are some reasonable scientists who have argued on this basis that a clone's cells might still be rejected by your body. However, if you use adult stem cells, derived from your own body, you won't run into any rejection problems.
Indeed, the only way to make a true clone of you would be to get the egg from your mother.
I take care of patients now, and I can tell you that it's almost cruel to go to the floor of the House or Senate and say we really need to do this research with human embryos and clones because breakthroughs are on the horizon.
Mind you that in my bill there is no prohibition on animal cloning. So scientists can proceed with all kinds of experiments on animal models, and if they really make major breakthroughs there, they could then make a better case to do these things with human clones.
Q: Isn't it true that researchers have already used adult stem cells to treat certain diseases?
Weldon: They've been doing it for 20 years in bone marrow transplants. It turns out that bone marrow that is transplanted into the patient eventually dies off. It is the stem cells that are actually in the marrow that actually repopulate the marrow and cure the patient.
Now all the other things that adult stem cells are used for are new and cutting edge. But it's very promising research: treating babies with cartilage defects, clinical trials with Alzheimer's disease and combined immunodeficiency disease. Embryonic stem cells, on the other hand, have never been used to do anything in a human trial. They haven't even been used to completely cure disease in a rat or a mouse.
Q: Sen. Brownback accurately predicted in an interview with Human Events last fall that the proponents of cloning would argue that a human being created via cloning was not really a human being that they would call it a “therapeutic” clone instead. Lo and behold, the National Academy of Science a few weeks ago issued a report saying they're against “human” cloning but in favor of “therapeutic” cloning. Is this going to be the basic lie used to advance the cause of cloning?
Weldon: Well, for those of us who have lived through the emergence of the phrase “I am pro-choice,” we all know the power of language. And the pro-cloners have been groping for the right phrase on this issue.
When I testified recently in the Senate Judiciary Committee, this spilled into the open when Sen. Arlen Specter [R.-Pa.] started talking about how they need a better word for human cloning. Sen. Dianne Feinstein [D.-Calif.] called it “nuclear transfer technology” in her bill.
She is trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the American public by not even mentioning the fact that she is advocating the wholesale creation of thousands of human clones in U.S. labs so that they can be destroyed for research.
Q: When they cloned Dolly the sheep, they took a somatic cell (an adult cell) from a sheep and put it into the de-nucleated egg cell of a sheep. That created the genetic twin of the donor sheep. When they put that adult sheep-cell nucleus into that de-nucleated egg cell, they created an embryo, correct?
Weldon: Right. They created a sheep embryo.
Q: Isn't this exactly same procedure they're now advocating for humans?
Weldon: Absolutely. To claim that cloned human embryos are not really embryos is kind of like saying the embryo Dolly came from was not a sheep embryo. I mean, of course it was a sheep embryo that grew up to become a sheep. The same thing applies for human cloning. A cloned human embryo will grow up to become a human adult.
Q: So as a matter of scientific fact, if you take a somatic cell nucleus from a human and put it into the egg of a human female and it starts to divide, that is a human embryo?
Weldon: Absolutely.
Q: And this goes directly to the heart of the lie they are trying to put over on us that a cloned human embryo is not a member of the species homo sapiens or that it's not a alive? They want to deny one of those two, cold, hard scientific facts?
Weldon: Absolutely. What they want to do is sway public opinion. You're using the term “human being” in its proper way. But many lay people think of a human being as you or me, an adult. A single cell in a dish, even a fertilized egg, they view as a cell in a dish. And at the 20- or 30-cell stage, it's an embryo. They wouldn't apply to it the label “human being,” but it's true that it is biologically a human being.
Pandora's Egg, er, Box
Q: Or you might even get scientists trying to introduce hybrid species?
Weldon: Yes. There's no doubt about that. This is why I said it's a Pandora's box. I think it's fully appropriate for us to say we don't want to go in this direction.
Now the biologists at National Academy of Sciences are just looking at cells under microscopes and they don't think there are any ethical quandaries about playing with them. They would like to run pell-mell and do whatever they want to do in their Petri dishes. They are not the appropriate people to look to in our society for guidance on what is really a moral, ethical, and political issue.
Q: Didn't you achieve your 100-vote majority in the House that included liberals and even a Socialist because most House members rejected on a fundamental basis the idea of cloning human beings?
Weldon: Yes. The coalition we put together was very interesting. We recognized that this was different from the abortion debate. That is one of the reasons why I steered away from leading with my chin on these moral issues of religion and faith and God. I recognized that some people on the Left would embrace the ban from a totally different perspective. There are people on the Left, for example, who fear genetic engineering, even in modified corn, and they saw this as playing with nature.
There was also concern over how cloning exploits women and it baffles me that people like Dianne Feinstein have turned a blind eye to it. To get eggs for cloning you have to give a woman a drug that induces super-ovulation. Normally, a woman loses one or two eggs each cycle. This drug causes her to releases 10, 20, 30 eggs per cycle. To retrieve the eggs, a doctor has to give the woman a general anesthetic, go into her pelvis with a laparoscope, and scoop these little cells off the surface of the ovaries. According to the New York Times, Advanced Cell Technology, the company that tried the cloning experiment up in Massachusetts, paid women $3,000 to $5,000 to donate eggs.
So, you know who's going to “donate” the eggs: poor women. To do this type of research in labs all across the country, you're going to need hundreds, maybe thousands of women desperate for money lining up to “donate” their eggs.
If “therapeutic” cloning to treat diseases ever became a reality, you may need millions of women all of the time donating their eggs. I believe that would make women's bodies a commodity. Clearly, cloning would lead to exploitation of women, especially poor women.
Q: Are abortion groups and the National Organization for Women coming out for the Feinstein bill and against yours and Brownback's?
Weldon: No, they are neutral.
Q: Are the environmental groups with you?
Weldon: Yes, some of them. To my knowledge none of them are against me.
(This article, which originally appeared in Human Events, is reprinted courtesy of Steven Ertelt and the Pro-Life Infonet email newsletter. For more information or to subscribe go to www.prolifeinfo.org or email infonet@prolifeinfo.org.)
