"Research cloning would contradict the most fundamental principle of medical ethics, that no human life should be exploited or extinguished for the benefit of another," said the president in a 2002 speech. "Yet a law permitting research cloning, while forbidding the birth of a cloned child, would require the destruction of nascent human life."
His thinking comported with the ethical principles stated in the Nuremburg Code issued by the American military tribunal that tried Nazi doctors after World War II. "No experiment," said the code, "should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur . . ."
On July 13, Kerry joined Sens. Orrin Hatch, R.-Utah, and Dianne Feinstein, D.-Calif., as co-sponsor of a bill that would do exactly what Bush is trying to stop: legalize the cloning of human beings while requiring those human beings to be killed. (The bill, S. 303, carries the misleading title, "Human Cloning Ban and Stem Cell Research Protection Act of 2003.")
"S. 303 does not outlaw the act of human cloning at all," writes Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith in The Weekly Standard. "Indeed, if passed, Hatch-Feinstein-Kerry would explicitly legalize doing in humans the very procedure -- somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) -- that was used to make Dolly the sheep." (Emphasis in original.)
Hatch-Feinstein-Kerry simply redefines the term "human cloning." Artificially crafting a human embryo that is the genetic duplicate of another human being is not "human cloning," according to the bill. "Human cloning" is only the act of placing the duplicated human being in a mother's womb -- or a substitute for a womb.
"The term 'human cloning,'" says the bill, "means implanting or attempting to implant the product of nuclear transplantation into a uterus or the functional equivalent of a uterus."
If implanted, this "product of nuclear transplantation" would do the same thing as any other implanted human embryo: It would become a human fetus, infant, toddler, teenager. The Hatch-Feintein-Kerry solution: Death at 14 days.
In the "Fourteen Day Rule," the bill refers to a cloned human being as "an unfertilized blastocyst" and says: "An unfertilized blastocyst shall not be maintained after more than 14 days from its first cell division . . ."
Just as Kerry says he wants to lift a ban on stem-cell research that Bush never imposed, he also wants to legalize the cloning and killing of human beings while pretending to prohibit cloning and serve human life.