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Australia Lifts Ban on Human Cloning For Research

Parliament says ends justify means

By Hilary White

CANBERRA, December 6, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – By an 82 to 62 House of Representatives vote, Australia’s parliament has lifted the legal prohibition on human cloning, despite opposition from the Prime Minister and party leaders.

Prime Minister John Howard voted against the legislation, a private member’s bill, saying, “In the end you have to take a stand for some absolutes in our society, and I think what we're talking about here is a moral absolute and that is why I can't support the legislation.”

The legislation had already passed in the Senate in early November by a narrow 34 to 32 vote. In addition to allowing human beings to be created for use as test subjects, the bill allows for human ova to be collected from aborted female foetuses.

Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile, leader of the Nationals party, said, “We must not attempt to achieve good ends through what I believe are immoral means.”

In early August, federal Health Minister Tony Abbott warned that to change the prohibition on cloning would overturn the country’s basic moral principles. “It is very hard to start muttering about the end not justifying the means,” said Abott, “and yet that has always been a classic position in the Western ethical tradition. I think we abandon it at our peril.”

The debate in the House was presented in the manner that has become the mainstream media’s boilerplate on the issue, as a conflict between “progressives” who want to find cures for diseases and backward “conservatives.” The bill’s sponsor, former health minister Kay Patterson, who said the law could be made more liberal, told reporters, “At some point people will say 'We don't believe the means justify the ends. At the moment, the parliament has said: 'That's not the case.'”

The anti-cloning group, Do No Harm: Australians for Ethical Stem Cell Research, collected 18,977 names on a petition asking legislators to defeat the bill.

In addition, the group, Hands off Our Ovaries, warned that the bill would allow vulnerable women to be exploited. “There have been too many instances of coercion and deception, and violations of informed consent. Left uncontrolled, research demands will place undue burdens on young, poor women,” the group said.

The debate began on Monday with party leaders who spoke against the change. Labour Party Leader Kevin Rudd, whose mother recently died after a battle with Parkinson’s disease, said, “I find it very difficult to support a legal regime that results in the creation of a form of human life for the single and explicit purpose of conducting experimentation on that form of human life.”

Treasurer Peter Costello rejected the commonly proffered argument that a human in the embryonic stage has less moral worth than an adult and that embryos should be ‘harvested’ because they would likely die anyway.  “According to this argument, the fact that an embryo is marked for death at the outset deprives it of moral significance," he said. "This appears to me to be rather a self-serving argument.”

The vote came just months after an announcement in August that the government was not going to revisit the country’s stem cell legislation.

Researchers in Australia are allowed to use so-called “spare” embryos to extract stem cells for research, but the law, passed in 2002, prohibited the creation of cloned human embryos for destructive research.

The new law will come into effect in six months, after the drafting of guidelines for its implementation.

Australian Health Minister Warns Cloning, Embryo Research: “A Bridge Too Far”
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2006/aug/06080302.html

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