Cloned Embryos Are Human

In a letter to the editor (July 10) of the St. Joseph News-Press entitled “The Debate Continues”, a self-proclaimed member of the mis-named Missouri Coalition for Lifesaving Cures reminded me of the mantra of the pro-death crowd.

He tried to warn “attempts to associate it [the proposed constitutional amendment legalizing cloning] with abortion are misguided…” But then he completed his sentence with “…since abortion is the termination of a pregnancy…”

Oh yeah, that tired, old devilish mantra raised its head again. People holding a pro-death philosophy can’t help themselves. For them, abortion is “termination of a pregnancy”. They never want to focus on the human life—the innocent, beautiful developing baby within the womb. There is only one way a pregnancy can be “terminated” and that is for the baby to be destroyed by some grotesquely violent abortion procedure. But this fellow has learned the mantra well—never talk about the baby.

That’s why I thought it ironic that he used that same logic to make his case for embryonic research being different from abortion. He called developing human embryos “…blastocysts (a microscopic clump of approximately 150 cells)…” Boy, isn’t that familiar? The baby is only a “fetus” or “mass of tissue” and now the embryo is a “blastocyst” or “microscopic clump of cells”. Pro-death advocates always use name-calling and re-labelling. African-Americans, Jews, babies have all been re-labelled to permit the most evil abuses mankind has ever known.

Fundamentally, we are dealing with a HUMAN embryo in the constitutional amendment. Advocates insist the embryo must be killed and not implanted into a mother’s womb and pride themselves thinking that is the moral high ground.

The writer displayed his stark and empty logic. Cloning “with the intention of creating a human being” is immoral. Cloning to kill an embryo is moral. No thank you sir. Intention does not determine morality. Few, if any drunks ever intended to kill someone when they drove their cars into their bodies. Intention isn’t the issue. Facts are. And factually, scientifically, somatic cell nuclear transfer creates a human life.