Embryo cloning claptrap - is there no limit to public gullibility?

Just recently we read of a momentous human trial published in the Journal of the American Medical Association using adult stem cells successfully in diabetics - achieving “prolonged insulin independence”. Also recently, corneal blindness cured in a Melbourne man using adult stem cells. That is stunning science, actually helping patients, versus the empty rhetoric of embryonic non-treatments and cloning.

But here is the serious point - that even if there were unique benefits to be had from embryo cloning, we would still have to reject it on ethical grounds alone.

Cloning creates a living human embryo - just like an IVF embryo - which could, like Dolly the sheep, be born as a baby. That central fact was acknowledged by the Lockhart Review and by the Senate Committee. Because it is wrong and inhuman to create embryos with the sole intention of destroying them in research, the Federal leaders of all the major parties rejected cloning last year.

Nevertheless, by one vote in the Senate and a gullible handful in the House, cloning was permitted. State MPs now considering the proposed “national uniform legislation” on cloning must justify this “create in order to destroy” approach to new human embryos. They need to defend legislation which is so degraded and dehumanising as to allow for an aborted baby girl (PDF 231KB) to be used as the “mother” of a cloned embryo.

And there are further inhumanities planned, which can only happen if the first steps in cloning are now permitted by the present generation of politicians. Australian ethicists writing in major journals have already proposed bringing cloned embryos to birth, and far worse, growing cloned embryos to the advanced fetal stage to harvest their organs for transplant (PDF53KB). Cloned fetus farming. Welcome to the brave new hell of cloning.

As the noted Australian jurist Frank Brennan put it recently:

But there is a second Rubicon. That is where we now stand. Beyond this is a city where the scientist is justified in creating human life only so that he might experiment on it and destroy it without the need for any respect of the dignity of that human life.

Will state and territory Parliaments cross that Rubicon, overturning the unanimous ethical judgement of the Parliament only four years ago, and agree to the intentional creation of living human embryos solely for research?

Or will they say “no” to this unnecessary evil, this hype and false hope, and turn instead to stem cell science that is both ethical and magnificently effective?