(1) some individuals have announced that they will attempt to clone human beings using the technique known as somatic cell nuclear transfer already used with limited success in sheep and other animals;
(2) nearly all scientists agree that such attempts pose a massive risk of producing children who are stillborn, unhealthy, or severely disabled, and considered opinion is virtually unanimous that such attempts are therefore grossly irresponsible and unethical;
(3) efforts to create human beings by cloning mark a new and decisive step toward turning human reproduction into a manufacturing process in which children are made in laboratories to preordained specifications and, potentially, in multiple copies;
(4) because it is an asexual form of reproduction, cloning confounds the meaning of ‘father’ and ‘mother’ and confuses the identity and kinship relations of any cloned child, and thus threatens to weaken existing notions regarding who bears which parental duties and responsibilities for children;
(5) because cloning requires no personal involvement by the person whose genetic material is used, cloning could easily be used to reproduce living or deceased persons without their consent;
(6) creating cloned live-born human children (sometimes called ‘reproductive cloning’) necessarily begins by creating cloned human embryos, a process which some also propose as a way to create embryos for research or as sources of cells and tissues for possible treatment of other humans;
(7) the prospect of creating new human life solely to be exploited and destroyed in this way has been condemned on moral grounds by many, including supporters of a right to abortion, as displaying a profound disrespect for life, and recent scientific advances with adult stem cells indicate that there are fruitful and morally unproblematic alternatives to this approach;
(8) in order to be effective, a ban on human cloning must stop the cloning process at the beginning because--
(A) cloning would take place within the privacy of a doctor-patient relationship;
(B) the transfer of embryos to begin a pregnancy is a simple procedure; and
(C) any government effort to prevent the transfer of an existing embryo, or to prevent birth once the transfer has occurred, would raise substantial moral, legal, and practical issues, so that it will be nearly impossible to prevent attempts at ‘reproductive cloning’ once cloned human embryos are available in the laboratory;
(9) the scientifically and medically useful practices of cloning of DNA fragments, known as molecular cloning, the duplication of somatic cells (or stem cells) in tissue culture, known as cell cloning, and whole-organism or embryo cloning of nonhuman animals are appropriate uses of medical technology;
(10) in the preamble to the 1998 Additional Protocol on the Prohibition of Cloning Human Beings the Council of Europe agreed that ‘the instrumentalisation of human beings through the deliberate creation of genetically identical human beings is contrary to human dignity and thus constitutes a misuse of biology and medicine’;
(11) collaborative efforts to perform human cloning are conducted in ways that affect interstate and even international commerce, and the legal status of cloning will have a great impact on how biotechnology companies direct their resources for research and development;
(12) at least 23 countries have banned all human cloning, including Canada, France, and Germany;
(13) the United Nations has passed a declaration calling for all human cloning to be banned by member nations; and
(14) attempts to create cloned human embryos for development of embryonic stem cell lines have been unsuccessful, most recently involving the exploitation of over a hundred women in South Korea to provide over 2,000 human eggs without the production of a single stem cell line.