AUSTRALIA’S bishops have called for a complete ban on human cloning.
The call came after US biotech company Advanced Cell Technology announced on November 26 that it had cloned a human embryo. The company predicted ‘a new age in medicine’, especially through the therapeutic use of embryonic stem cells.
On November 29, the bishops called on Australia’s politicians to enact uniform legislation to comprehensively ban all forms of human cloning.
In Sydney for their twice-yearly meeting, the bishops said no human life was ‘expendable or exploitable, even for arguably good ends’.
‘In the case of cloning,’ said bishops’ conference president Archbishop Francis Carroll, ‘human embryos, the most vulnerable and completely voiceless members of the human family, are destroyed on the pretext that they contain cells which may, at some future time, provide some cure for a wide range of medical conditions.
A report by a federal parliamentary inquiry into cloning, chaired by Victorian MP Kevin Andrews, went to the House of Representatives just before parliament rose for the election campaign.
The committee was divided in its recommendations.
The bishops’ research officer, Dr Warwick Neville, said that if inadequate cloning legislation was enacted by a state or the Commonwealth, it could be hard to challenge in court because of the difficulty of proving a ‘direct interest’ to justify the challenge. Already Queensland Right to Life (QRTL) has rejected legislation introduced in the Queensland Parliament by Health Minister Wendy Edmond on November 27.
