Doctors Push For Ban on Clones
CMA doctors cite medical, ethical and spiritual reasons in urging human cloning ban.
by Jennifer Pickel

Washington, DC, --The nation's largest organization of faith-based doctors today urged support for the bipartisan Human Cloning Prohibition Act, introduced by Reps. Dave Weldon (R-Fla.) and Bart Stupak (D-Mich.).

David Stevens, M.D., Executive Director of the 18,000-member Christian Medical Association, noted, "The House has come through in the past, while the Senate has procrastinated on this issue to the point where we may have come to the brink of a cloned human baby. With the full backing of the White House and with Drs. Weldon and Frist bringing their valuable medical perspectives to bear on this issue, we expect Congress to expedite getting the bill on the President's desk for signature.

"We need a ban on human cloning of any kind, and we need it now. It is foolhardy to think that anything short of a complete ban will stop rogue scientists from implanting a cloned human embryo."

Dr. Stevens explained that human cloning must be banned for medical, ethical and spiritual reasons: "Medically speaking, human cloning risks mutation, gross abnormalities, transmission of mitochondrial diseases, and other yet-unknown effects of tampering with the mystery of aging.

"Ethically, the pursuit of human cloning will involve the deaths of human embryos during development. The use of human life merely as a means to an end is morally unacceptable. Human cloning threatens long-standing principles related to parentage, lineage, family structure and the uniqueness of the individual. Children are unique individuals with inestimable worth; their value is not derived from serving as replacements for other human beings. Children require parents' unconditional love; they are not consumer products to be chosen for desired features or discarded for unwanted liabilities.

"And spiritually, human cloning deviates from the wisdom of God's design for human relationships and genetic diversity. The historical Judeo-Christian ethic, founded upon clear biblical principles, holds that human life is sacred because each individual is made in God's image; that God's design is that each individual is formed by the union of genetic material from a husband and a wife; and that the family is the basic social unit designed by God to receive and nurture new human life."

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