Contact: Stacey Holliday, Concerned Women for America, 202-488-7000 ext. 126
WASHINGTON, Mar. 29 /Christian Newswire/ -- Concerned Women for America (CWA) strongly supports the bi-partisan legislation introduced by Senators Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) and Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana) to ban human cloning.
CWA's President, Wendy Wright, said, "Since human cloning is nearly universally condemned, cloning advocates have renamed it 'somatic cell nuclear transfer' to confuse people and push what they know is unpopular. This legislation to ban cloning is necessary to protect human beings - no matter how they are created - from being used as materials for experiments."
In 2005, the United Nations passed a Declaration calling on all countries to adopt legislation outlawing all cloning practices "as they are incompatible with human dignity and the protection of human life." The declaration also calls on countries to "prevent the exploitation of women." Cloning requires harvesting eggs from women. Wendy Wright, who was actively involved in the passage of the Declaration, stated, "UN delegates, especially from developing countries, expressed concern that poor women would be targeted to extract the vast numbers of eggs that would be needed, inevitably inflicting painful and dangerous procedures on vulnerable women."
Wright goes on to say, "Scientists have admitted a reason they want to clone humans is to create 'disease models,' that is, deliberately creating human beings with particular diseases so the scientist can watch how the disease progresses and ravages the little one, and to test drugs on the cloned human.
"Cloning defies the uniqueness of each individual, using technology to manipulate and control human beings. It would create a class of humans deprived of a clear identity, parents and family. Cloning treats human beings as a commodity to be used for another person's benefit.
"This legislation to ban cloning upholds human dignity and bans the manipulation of human life for personal gain and exploitation."
Concerned Women for America is the nation's largest public policy women's organization.
