In the annals of popular democracy, one of the strangest initiatives ever to make it to the ballot is the $3 billion bond known as Proposition 71. It is intended to sustain biotech researchers from the public purse while they pursue a project that private investors have already decided is worthless. And it is a project that nation after nation around the world has already declared to be a felony.

Four things warrant attention:

-- First, we need to be told the truth about the initiative. It purports to be focused on the need for "stem-cell research" to be legal and funded in California. But stem-cell research is already legal and funded in California. That is true of adult stem-cell research, which raises no ethical problems and has already led to cures for what had been incurable diseases. It is true of embryonic stem-cell research, which raises ethical problems for many people (pro-choice as well as anti-abortion) because it involves destroying human embryos. It is even true of cloning, the mass manufacture of human embryos for experiments.

None of this is illegal in California. All of it can be funded by the state, if that's what the state wants to do. In the case of adult stem cells, and some embryonic stem-cell research, it is now being funded by the federal government. Of course, all this research can also be funded by private resources.

-- Second, we need to grasp the fact that this is all about cloning. It is California's cloning proposition. Don't be taken in by talk of the need for extra cell lines for research, or the fate of unwanted frozen embryos. The so- called "therapeutic cloning" idea is what has taken the media by storm, gripped the popular imagination, activated celebrities including the widow of the state's most famous actor/politician, and offered that fragile and most precious quality to the sick and those who love them -- hope.

The idea is disarmingly simple: The technique that cloned Dolly the sheep in 1996 can be used to clone sick people. The cloned embryo, in effect your twin, can be a source of stem cells that will regenerate your tissue, and cure whatever your degenerative disease may be. (In fact, animal cloning experiments have been remarkably unsuccessful, because the embryo stem cells have a nasty habit of causing tumors.)

-- Third, we need to be clear about what's happening outside California. Supporters of cloning for stem cells love to perpetuate the myth that their only opponents are crazy anti-abortion activists. That's plainly a lie; there is no other word for it. If it were true, why has all human cloning -- including exactly the kind of research that the proposition would have us fund -- been prohibited in Canada, under federal law? Why did Australia do the same thing? Why in Germany (where they know a thing or two about unethical research) will it get you five years in jail? Why is France on the verge of a similar law? None of these countries is in the grip of anti-abortion conservatives. Why is momentum building for a global convention to ban cloning at the United Nations (it had 66 co-sponsors last time around)? Nation by nation, the civilized world is turning its back on the mass production of human embryos for destructive experimentation.

-- Fourth: We need to grasp the proposition's bizarre economics. It is being said that this vast investment will actually save health-care costs, as well as cure diseases. This claim does not hold up to logical scrutiny for three reasons: Key pro-cloning researchers have admitted this would take much longer than the five years after which repayment on the bond is scheduled; even if they worked, the one-on-one medications predicted will be hugely expensive; and if the sponsors of the initiative could promise just 10 percent of their claims, private money would be swamping the market. Anyone making such a claim in an IPO prospectus would do jail time. But the proposition is a prospectus to the people of California, and the combination of hype and hubris needs to be nailed. The one thing certain about the proposition is that it will pump billions of public dollars into the pockets of researchers and businesses.

But this is not a mere matter of opinion. California's business community has already made up its mind. If it believed the hype of those behind the proposition, it would be pouring funds into the field in the expectation of reaping vast profits. Instead, it has already voted with its feet.

That is exactly what the people of California need to do in November. They need to resist this effort to railroad them into closing schools and cutting food-stamp programs while they featherbed researchers in privileged positions in which they have a constitutional right to pursue research that business won't fund and legislatures don't believe in.

Published in the San Fransisco Chronicle, Sunday, July 11, 2004

News Flash:
France Says No to Cloning

"A comprehensive ban on human cloning for any purpose has been passed by the French parliament. This cloning ban follows a parallel ban enacted in March by Canada, and shows how international opinion is stacking up against human cloning for experimental purposes. Both France and Canada allow research on embryos from in vitro fertilization, but have decisively rejected the mass-production of embryos by cloning for this purpose. They join many nations, including Germany, Norway, and Australia, in banning this unethical technology. In the process, they show the dishonesty of almost all US press coverage of this debate, since it consistently presents the impression that only pro-lifers oppose cloning. It is hardly surprising that the US press refuses to report this news."

Center for Bioethics and Culture

This week the New York Times published an article titled One is Enough. The article conveys the reflections of a young woman upon finding out she was pregnant with triplets.

This unmarried 34 year old woman first describes the logistical hassles that would result from giving birth to triplets, including her 5 story walk-up in East Village and the possibility that she’d need bed rest and not be able to lecture freelance at colleges. She dreads having to shop at Costco to “buy big jars of mayonnaise”.

She admits that, on the one hand, she would be able to “work around” the inconveniences but freely admits that the real question was, “Do I want to?”

She decides to terminate one or more of the babies. Her reflections on the procedure are surprisingly candid, admitting that before the twins were terminated, she was focusing on trying to relax. But her boyfriend Peter was staring at the monitor thinking, “Oh, my gosh, there are three heartbeats. I can't believe we're about to make two disappear.” He wanted to stay during the procedure but the doctor refused and he had to leave.

Having successfully terminated the twins, she reports having a seamless pregnancy and giving birth to a baby boy.

If you really like irony, a fallen world is the place to be! The remarkable knowledge of life in the womb that ultra-sound gives us can also be used to destroy that life.

Along with technologies that enable this kind of up-close-and-personal abortion (by an injection into the fetal heart) are technologies that will mass-produce embryos for the purpose of research and, if we believe the "therapeutic cloning" hype, for one-on-one medications that will require that we first make, then destroy, our own twins.

So what is the world coming to? These approaches treat the product of human reproduction as something less than human, some thing in our power and at our disposal, some artifact of the lab or accidental product of sex that is ours to do with as we please. For the key message of the clone age is that we must reframe the debate about abortion. We must set the destruction of the unborn side by side with their manufacture as twin abuses. They both show our failure to grasp that whatever the means of reproduction or their stage of development, ALL human life is human. They are another one of us. They do not exist for our killing, or our experimenting, or our anything - but for him or her self, someone different from all those of us who have been before, someone destined for an eternity all his or her own.

For Christians, these little humans - whether early embryos or developing fetuses, whether they come from human procreation or the banal manufacture of cloning - while their lives in this world may be short, they have still lived and have still died. They have still been. They are united, as Augustine once wrote, with us in death; shall they not also be united with us in the resurrection of the dead?

It is not our place to decide that they are not human.

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

California paved the way for Alfred Ploetz, father of the German eugenics movement. California’s forced sterilization practices became so prominent they were held up as a model for the Nazi regime.

Last year the California state senate heard a chilling account of eugenic practices sanctioned by the state nearly 100 years ago. Eugenics expert, Paul Lombardo, presented detailed accounts of efforts by state officials to improve the human species by selective breeding using forced sterilization and asexualization procedures.

"Lombardo said he fears that Americans, who have forgotten their eugenic excesses, could be beguiled into thinking modern science can cure social ills like poverty, crime and disease.

'There's an impulse toward eugenics that is very much alive today,' Lombardo said. 'The basic belief that we can use science to engineer social progress is an idea that many Americans believe in.'

'The point of my presentation is not to paint science as something scary and Frankensteinian,' he said, adding that 'at least as we forge ahead in the new genetics we should take our history into account.'"

Ron Reagan to Advocate Embryonic Stem Cell Research at Democratic Convention

It's no secret that Ron Reagan shares his mother's views on embryonic stem cell research. After President Reagan's death, they both used the opportunity to voice their belief that embryonic stem cell research holds the promise of a cure for Alzheimer's, the disease that plagued President Reagan.

Ron Reagan will share his views at the upcoming Democratic Convention in Boston.

In a CNN article about the invitation to Reagan a Kerry advisor remarked that "... Reagan's appearance at the convention would communicate to the American people that the Democratic ticket of Kerry and Sen. John Edwards 'won't put ideology in front of sound science and let politics get in the way of what is best for the American people.'"

World Magazine blog posted an opinion by Alzheimer's researcher Michael Shelanski that was published in a recent Washington Post article. He is quoted as saying, "I think the chance of doing repairs to Alzheimer's brains by putting in stem cells is small."

Michael Shelanski is co-director of the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer's Disease and the Aging Brain at the Columbia University Medical Center in New York. His opinion is echoed by many other Alzheimer's Disease experts. He also said, "I personally think we're going to get other therapies for Alzheimer's a lot sooner."

Responses to: U.S. Senate Debates Federal Marriage Amendment

What a bunch of humanist garbage. Not one mention of the primary reason to ban gay "marriage" God who created heaven and earth, including man and woman in His own image, absolutely forbids it and clearly states in His Word the Bible, the only reliable source of truth, that it is a perversion of His creation. God holds all of us accountable for our actions and those who chose to follow a gay lifestyle and worse yet insist that the whole world, including Bible believing Christians, recognize their perversion as good rather than evil like every other kind of sin, will one day have to give an account to Almighty God. In the meantime I resent their agenda of trying to force the acceptance of their perversion on the whole of the US culture which claims to adhere to Judeo-Christian values.    D. O.

Dear Sirs: I appreciate your concern over the dispute concerning the marriage amendment. I admire and applaud the courage of President Bush in proposing an amendment to the Constitution regarding the definition of marriage as existing between a man and woman only. It is a shame that such a clarification has to be made.

We all have responsibility in the eyes of God, creator of man and woman, who called them to cooperate with him in the procreation of all human beings. We are offending the incomparable blessing and role of women as mothers. At the very same time, we are responsible for the authenticity of human nature. The eyes of many nations are fixed on us. I can assure you that those who denigrate the beauty of marriage will pass into history as an embarrassment. This is a great country; let us keep our standards high!

I strongly believe in President Bush because he is acting courageously against different agendas and philosophies of life. Mr Bush is the kind of president we need at this moment - a man with solid values and principles - not a weathervane moved by winds that yield to human conveniences and manipulations.

I would tell Mr Bush: Thank you for your support and understanding of what is the only true marriage. I very much value your consistency and hope people strongly support your reelection. If it should happen that your are not reelected, you will leave the presidency with your head high and your integrity intact.   J. M.

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