David Weldon: “the bioethical issues that we have been debating for the past several years, and particularly over the last couple of…”

“the bioethical issues that we have been debating for the past several years, and particularly over the last couple of months, deal with fundamental questions about the value of human life and the meaning of human dignity. Every poll conducted on the subject of human embryo cloning for research indicates that 70 to 80 percent of the American people oppose human embryo cloning for research purposes. Cloning advocates know that the American public is adamantly opposed to their goals, so they have crafted new speech in an attempt to deliberately mislead Members of Congress, the media, grassroots advocates and the American public. One of the leading patient advocacy groups for human cloning research is the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, and they have been sanitizing the language and playing semantic games with a willing media and an unaware American public. Let me give you a few examples. Last year when representatives of the JDRF stopped by my office, they shared with my staff that they endorsed stem cell research involving somatic cell nuclear transfer. When my staff replied that somatic cell nuclear transfer, or SCNT, was the cloning of human embryos, the JDRF advocates in my office responded that they had been told by those training them for their Hill visit that SCNT did not create a human embryo because sperm was not used.…”