Congress: Votes and Amendments (Cloning/Embryos)

Cloning

Shortly following the February 1997 announcement that researchers in Scotland had successfully cloned Dolly the sheep, President Clinton issued an executive order, which remains in force, banning the use of federal funds for purposes of human cloning. This order, however, did not prohibit research on cloning done by private institutions.

There are currently no federal laws in the United States that prohibit human cloning, either for research or for reproductive purposes. Research cloning refers to when scientists attempt to create a clone of an embryo only, which would then be used for scientific research. Such an embryo would not be permitted to continue to grow and develop. Reproductive cloning, in contrast, refers to creating an organism that grows to maturity. This organism would be genetically identical to the original. Thus far, scientists have been unable to successfully create a human clone for either purpose.

Nevertheless, there have been three major attempts by Congress to prohibit or regulate human cloning. The first attempt took place in February 1998, when Democratic Senators Dianne Feinstein of California and Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts formally introduced S. 1602, which sought to ban human reproductive cloning for 10 years while allowing for limited research cloning. The bill would have required scientists to eventually destroy cloned embryos rather than allowing them to grow to maturity. In response, Republican Senators Kit Bond of Missouri, Bill Frist of Tennessee, and Trent Lott of Mississippi introduced S. 1601, which was intended to prohibit human cloning for either reproductive or research purposes. S. 1601 was quickly blocked by a procedural tactic, and the Senate declined to consider a vote on the Fein—stein-Kennedy version of the bill.

The second attempt came in April 2001, when independent scientists announced their intentions to clone a human being. The House considered two separate bills similar to those considered by the Senate in 1998. H.R. 2172, the Cloning Prohibition Act of 2001, introduced by Representative James Greenwood, a Republican from Pennsylvania, would have banned reproductive human cloning for 10 years and required private researchers to inform the government if human embryos were cloned for research purposes. H.R. 2525, The Human Cloning Prohibition Action of 2001, was also introduced by Representative David Weldon, a Democrat from Florida, and called for a ban on both reproductive and research cloning. The House passed H.R. 2525 in July by a vote of 265–162, with most House Republicans supporting the bill, along with several conservative Democrats. The bill failed to become law, however, because of the failure of the Senate to vote on the bill's counterpart, S. 790, proposed by Senator Sam Brown—back, a Republican from Kansas.

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