David Weldon: “This is clearly a line in the sand. It is a demarcation point; and if we go across that line, if we say we are going to…”

“This is clearly a line in the sand. It is a demarcation point; and if we go across that line, if we say we are going to start creating human lives for the purpose of exploiting them for scientific research and then discarding them, where does that take us next? What comes around the corner? I have been arguing for years that it will usher in reproductive cloning. Indeed, in testimony that we received in my committee, we had a Dr. Cohen, Brian Cohen, who represented the American Society of Reproductive Medicine; and in his testimony he repeatedly said ``We are opposed to reproductive cloning at this time,'' and he said it twice. Finally I asked him, ``Why did you say `We are opposed to reproductive cloning at this time'?'' And this fellow represents the Association of Fertility Experts in the United States, and essentially his response to me was that once all the science is worked out on this where it can be done safely, they want to be able to do it. They want to be able to clone human beings. And this is the brave new world, no longer confined to fiction literature, but it has essentially arrived because the follow-ons to this will be genetic manipulation, genetic enhancements. Eugenetics is what it is called, an attempt to try to eliminate undesirable traits in our culture and our society.”