So few people are aware of the actual provisions of Senator Patterson’s cloning Bill now before Federal Parliament, and in only a few days it might become a done deal.
Judging from the response to our recent nationwide newspaper ad, including the response from the Sydney ABC Radio drive host after I explained the Bill to her, at least one of the most repulsive provisions is going to come back to bite the framers of this legislation.
During the Senate inquiry into our laws banning cloning, I asked Senator Patterson what the public would think of her proposal to let an aborted baby girl be used as the ‘mother’ of a cloned embryo which will then be destroyed in research.
She did not answer, but conferred closely with Senator Moore, who first tried to call my bluff – asking for me to show just exactly where such a provision was made in the Bill. Then, when I started to quote chapter and verse she cut across me to say she would take that on notice (apparently to stop me putting the facts on Hansard).
The exchange, for the record, went thusly – and I admit to having enjoyed being asked the opening question… Nothing I like more than a limp question from a moral-equivalence post-modernist type who feels that if there are ‘alternative’ views then they must all be considered to be of equal moral worth!
Senator MOORE— Dr van Gend, before my time runs out, which is imminent, I want to get on the record, from your position, whether you accept that there are genuinely alternative views on the arguments you have put forward and whether the debate has been open.
Dr van Gend—I think there are obviously alternative views. I quoted Professor Savulescu, who is professor of ethics at Oxford. He is a Melbourne man. He wants to create cloned embryos, grow them to foetuses and cull them for their organs to solve the transplant issue. He is a very serious man and he holds a very genuine view—and I hate it. I think on this we agree that there will be views held by people which we find horrendous, and that is one of them. I find it horrendous that in Senator Patterson’s bill she is proposing that an aborted baby girl can be used to become the mother of a cloned embryo which will then be destroyed in research. You ask the public what they think of that and see if there is ‘deep and widely held opposition’, to quote the Lockhart committee, to the proposal of using precursor cells from an aborted foetus in order to generate a cloned embryo that can be used in research. See what comes of that.
Senator MOORE—I give up. Can you actually show me in the draft bill and the explanatory memorandum where that is allowed. I would like to see where in the bill the statement you just made is proposed. I put that to you on notice.
Dr van Gend—I can tell you now. On page 3 of 30 of the first section of the explanatory memorandum it says:
create human embryos using precursor cells from a human embryo or a human fetus, and use such embryos ...
So it is talking about using the precursor cells from a human foetus to create a cloned embryo— that is the ovarian precursor for a little egg out of an aborted baby girl. That is what a precursor cell is defined as in the current act. You ask the public what they think about creating clones from aborted baby girls which will then be destroyed in research. It will fail the Lockhart test.
Senator MOORE—I will go back and have a look.
Tuesday, 24 October 2006 Senate CA 110 COMMUNITY AFFAIRS
Indeed, another good look – and no doubt this foulest of the many filthy provisions in the Patterson Bill will look like a political liability now that it has been exposed, and will be traded away in the amendments, as the pro-cloning Senators try to cobble together a slim majority next week.
Still, let it be on the record for now that Senater Patterson’s Bill does propose such vileness, such a morally degraded concept as would once have disqualified the proposer from public office in a decent society.
And let it be on the record that all her protestations about this Bill NOT allowing the creation of sperm-egg embryos are exposed as false. For some superstitious reason, Senator Patterson and the Lockhart committee consider the sperm-egg embryo to be quite different in moral status from an SCNT embryo - even though, in themselves, they are all embryos trying to grow into babies. Yet here we have an admission from both Patterson and Lockhart (see below) that they did have a hidden provision in their Bill for creation of sperm-egg embryos – using the ova from the aborted baby.
This is plain deceitful: making these stern claims about the wrongness of creating sperm-egg embryos, then sneaking in this means of creating sperm-egg embryos, under the cloak of jargon like ‘precursor cells’.
In case there is any doubt as to the meaning and intent of this provision – of creating and using human embryos from precursor cells from a fetus – remember that ‘precursor cells’ are explained in the current Act as being the immature sperm or egg cells in the primitive gonads of the fetus.
And in response to questions on notice from Senator Barnett, Loane Skene for the Lockhart Committee has admitted that they did ‘envisage’ the use of eggs from aborted baby girls for making embryos. Further:
1. That their recommendation will allow eggs from aborted baby girls to be used either for cloning or for fertilisation by sperm from an adult male.
2. That they gave no particular consideration to community opinion on this particular issue.
3. That to avoid the fact that fetal eggs create an sperm-egg embryo, which they claim to ban, they simply chose to think of an embryo made using fetal precursor cells as being 'more like' an "SCNT embryo" than an "egg-sperm" embryo made for IVF.
Wishful thinking as a way of living with duplicity. And we are meant to respect this sneaky mob?
Let’s hope our Senators are skeptical enough of the slippery ethics of the Lockhart Committee and the shameless hype of certain scientists to retain the ban on such inhumanities as this -making an aborted baby girl the dead ‘mother’ of embryos created solely for destruction.
What are we becoming? Have we entirely lost the moral sanity that makes us say 'No! Enough!'
The week ahead will tell.
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