MEDIA RELEASE – Thursday 7th December 2006
CLONING VOTE: CONSCIENCE CRUSHED BY ‘CON SCIENCE’
“This tragic and shameful vote has been a victory for ‘con science’ over conscience”, said Dr David van Gend, National Director of Australians for Ethical Stem Cell Research.
“The issue of conscience was clearly defended by 62 MPs. They refused on principle, like the entire Parliament in 2002, to cross the line of creating living human embryos solely for research.
“But ‘con science’ was too powerful for the other 82 MPs. Like superstitious peasants they believed the witchdoctors who held out hope of miracle cures from cloning. The credulity of these MPs was touching and pitiful – any disease suffered by any relative became reason enough for them to declare they ‘would not stand in the way of a cure’.
“The moral damage to society has now been done by approving a laboratory subclass of human young, created only for exploitation. But now that we have cut ourselves loose from the essential ethical principle – that no human life can be exploited for the benefit of other human lives – there is no way to get a grip on the slippery slope to further desecrations.
“We put it on the record now: with the next review in 4 years time, scientists will again be asking to create animal-human hybrid embryos, and will be asking to grow cloned embryos a little longer so they can extract more useful mature tissues. Eventually we will be taking seriously the request of Melbourne Professor Julian Savulescu to grow cloned fetuses in order to obtain their organs for transplant.
“For all those misguided MPs who abandoned ethical principle in favour of fatuous dreams of cures from cloning, who have agreed to let aborted baby girls be made the ‘mother’ of embryos, on what rock of ethical principle will you resist these further violations of our humanity? You have none. If these human young are officially, in your eyes, mere meat for the consumption of science, then why not use more mature meat?
“This vote for cloning was not a vote for hope – the only real hope is being provided by the entirely ethical field of adult stem cell science. This was a vote for hype and inhumanity – for an immoral and unnecessary science that will create new lives solely for exploitation." ENDS.
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Dr Van Gend, lets stop ignoring the elephant in the room here. It seems pretty obvious from reading a variety of your colourful posts that your inspiration behind restricting therapeutic cloning is based on your religious motivations and not on sound science or ethics. Through out the course of the parimentry inquiry into therapeutic cloning I would like to know if you could name one credible scientist who labelled it a "miracle cure"? For SCNT is not a miracle cure, but arguably the most promising area of science for developing treatments for life threating diseases and debilitating conditions. No scientist working with stem cells at the present time would say cures for diabetes or spinal cord injuries are anywhere but decades off. However, to restrict this area of science would be tantamount to a return to the darkages. To describe the ministers who voted in favour of SCNT "like superstitious peasants" seems a bit rich when religious dogma states that the soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception. There is no way a petri dish of undifferentiated cells can compare to a full born human.
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