I wonder why? They would all have made great headlines. They are even true. And they give us some of the best news we have had in a long time.

Of course, at the same time they would break open one of the favorite stereotypes of the press: that anyone who opposes “therapeutic cloning” is a pro-life nut, and that the only reason President Bush opposes it is that he is under their power.

But Russia? Saudi Arabia? African and Pacific island states? Germany?

GERMANY?

What is this dirty little secret that the press has labored to keep quiet?

The legal committee of the United Nations General Assembly has voted for a declaration that calls on the nations of the world to ban all human cloning – for whatever purpose.

The vote still needs to be sustained in the full General Assembly, but because the legal committee is a committee of the whole (all the nations are represented) its own vote is big news.

After several years of proposals, delays, votes, and more votes, we have a decision. And it’s a very good decision.

True, “declarations” do not have binding force. In the first place, discussion focused on whether the UN could agree on a “convention,” which is a kind of treaty that nations sign onto (if they choose) and are then obliged to write into their own laws. But since conventions are voluntary (like the Kyoto convention on global warming: no-one is obliged to sign it), the difference between a convention and a declaration is not as big as its critics (like the UK) have already begun to claim. One of the most famous documents of the 20th century is the UN’s Universal Declaration on Human Rights.

Make no mistake, this cloning declaration is big news. Because it tells the world that biotechnology is an ethical issue, and that the huge lobbying efforts of biotech companies and celebrities who want to clone human embryos by the millions for experiments and death has not succeeded. However, they have brought efforts to ban cloning in federal law to a stalemate. The Senate may yet pass the Weldon-Brownback cloning ban, though despite its huge success in the House it has been stalled. But there are other places where big biotech money does not get in the way of democracy quite so easily.

Another reason the UN cloning ban is big news is this: it includes a ringing declaration of the rights of women in the face of demands by corporate biotech and the customers they serve. And while feminist activists have often found themselves opposing pro-lifers on abortion at the UN, this time something strange has happened.

Some women’s rights campaigners have been glad to side with pro-lifers on cloning - for a simple reason. Advocates of “therapeutic cloning” always gloss over one key requirement of their planned embryo experiments: the eggs. Cloning makes embryos without sperm, but it does not make them without eggs.

It has been calculated that it could take 100 human eggs to get one human embryo clone for an experiment. That means it will take hundreds of millions of women to provide the eggs needed for “therapeutic cloning” to provide the one-on-one medications that have been promised – for example, in the notorious speech of Ron Reagan, Jr., to the Democratic Convention last fall.

Women’s advocates may not oppose embryonic stem cell research using spare in vitro embryos, but they are very unhappy about having women super-ovulate so they can be the egg factories for experimenters, biotech corporations, and wealthy consumers wanting their "own personal medical toolkit".

That’s one reason why Judy Norsigian, famed editor of the pro-choice healthcare book Our Bodies, Ourselves, signed the rebuttal to California’s Prop. 71 (which allocated $6 billion to cloning and stem cell research). It explains why around the world many nations that allow abortion do not want to allow biotech corporations to buy poor women’s eggs wholesale.

So feminists have been pressing to control these new technologies, and the UN Declaration passed by the legal committee includes a clause that sets out their concern: in section (d) "Member States are called upon to take measures to prevent the exploitation of women in the applications of life sciences".

If and when the American press does get around to reporting on this vote in the United Nations, it will have to come clean on the whole story.

I wonder how many California voters who backed Prop. 71 knew that “therapeutic cloning” is a serious crime in many parts of the world? And I don’t just mean Catholic countries where human life is taken more seriously than in others. I mean in Canada. And Australia. And Germany, where they know a thing or two about unethical science.

Even FRANCE!

Last July France made “therapeutic cloning” a felony. Do it there and you will get seven years in jail.

Strange bedfellows at the UN have blazed the trail for cloning bans around the world. Let’s work to get this news out in the media of our communities.

Crisis-hit Lebanon seeks new PM

A search for a new prime minister has begun in Lebanon after the government of Omar Karami resigned amid massive street protests.

President Emile Lahoud has given political groups in parliament 48 hours to agree on a candidate, reports say.

Hundreds of people are rallying again in the capital, Beirut, demanding the pullout of some 15,000 Syrian troops.

Worldwide Domino Effect?
Mark Steyn Weighs In

"Consider just the past couple of days' news: not the ever more desperate depravity of the floundering "insurgency", but the real popular Arab resistance the car-bombers and the head-hackers are flailing against: the Saudi foreign minister, who by remarkable coincidence goes by the name of Prince Saud, told Newsweek that women would be voting in the next Saudi election. "That is going to be good for the election," he said, "because I think women are more sensible voters than men."

Four-time Egyptian election winner - and with 90 per cent of the vote! - President Mubarak announced that next polling day he wouldn't mind an opponent. Ordering his stenographer to change the constitution to permit the first multi-choice presidential elections in Egyptian history, His Excellency said the country would benefit from "more freedom and democracy". The state-run TV network hailed the president's speech as a "historical decision in the nation's 7,000-year-old march toward democracy". After 7,000 years on the march, they're barely out of the parking lot, so Mubarak's move is, as they say, a step in the right direction.

Meanwhile in Damascus, Boy Assad, having badly overplayed his hand in Lebanon and after months of denying that he was harbouring any refugee Saddamites, suddenly discovered that - wouldja believe it? - Saddam's brother and 29 other bigshot Baghdad Baathists were holed up in north-eastern Syria, and promptly handed them over to the Iraqi government.

And, for perhaps the most remarkable development, consider this report from Mohammed Ballas of Associated Press: "Palestinians expressed anger on Saturday at an overnight suicide bombing in Tel Aviv that killed four Israelis and threatened a fragile truce, a departure from former times when they welcomed attacks on their Israeli foes."

tothesource Flashback - From October 20, 2004

How Many Embryos Does it Take to Make A Clone?

The business of cloning will turn the women of the developing world into a human egg factory

Ron Reagan made headlines for his speech to the DNC by alluding to the rosy future of medicine when the practice of therapeutic cloning (though he didn't use the term) will afford everyone their "own personal medical toolkit". That's code for: when everyone can clone themselves to create a genetically matched embryo from which they can derive stem cells on an as needed basis.

Apart from the science, that is speculative at best, somebody better do the math! Current research suggests that it would take a minimum of 100 eggs per patient, at a cost of $100,000 - $200,000.

Creator of Dolly Granted License to Clone Humans For Experimentation

China’s struggles with gender selection

"Beginning in January, this city enacted a pioneering ban on abortions after the 14th week of pregnancy, part of a campaign to address one of the world’s biggest gaps between male and female births that, though piecemeal, is quickly gathering momentum across China. National laws already prohibit sonograms for gender detection, which becomes possible after the 14th week, but the law has been spottily enforced."

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