On Thursday of last week (January 12), my colleague Joe Carter and myself provided testimony at an Illinois committee hearing. As proponents of a bill to ban the funding of human cloning in Illinois, our testimony focused on how human cloning will exploit women, especially poor and minorities, in that it is her eggs that are necessary to the pursuit of human cloning.
The Human Services Committee of the Illinois General Assembly seemed completely uninterested in the facts. Sometime after Joe and I finished giving our testimony, the chairman began a comment with "You people..." as he went on to complain that people like us - I guess conservative, white people - shouldn't be worrying ourselves about the exploitation of the poor and minority communities...apparently that's forbidden territory. And at some point after that outrageous remark, the chairman attempted to describe the goal of human cloning, describing embryonic stem cell research as somehow creating a clone and injecting it into a person's spine (as one example he had for treatment.) Finally, a witness who offered testimony for the opposition of this bill insisted that eggs are not needed for human cloning, that we can get all we need from left over embryos at fertility clinics. Apparently she doesn't know that those aren't cloned embryos in frozen storage at fertility clinics. It's a shame that this level of intellect is attempting to play a role of leadership at an organization called Protestants for the Common Good...but then, perhaps, that's all they have.
An interesting quote I found today is egg in the face of Illinois' liberal political establishment: "You cannot clone an embryo without an egg and you cannot get eggs without a clinic." This, from Newcastle University Professor Michael Whitaker, dean of research at its faculty of medical sciences.
