April 15, 2003
As two Senate committees hold competing hearings on the issue of human cloning, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) has said that he and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) are close to achieving the 60 votes they need to pass their proposed ban on human reproductive cloning (S. 303).
The bill, a similar version of which was introduced in the 107th Congress by Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), would outlaw attempts to initiate a pregnancy using cloning techniques, but would allow research to go forward using cloned embryos, which is often referred to as "research cloning." Sens. Sam Brownback (R-KS) and Mary Landrieu (D-LA) have authored competing legislation which would outlaw both reproductive and research cloning by banning the creation of a cloned embryo for any purpose (S. 245).
At the end of the 107th Congress, the Senate was deadlocked on the issue, with neither the Brownback-Landrieu nor the Hatch-Feinstein legislation having the 60 votes required to defeat a filibuster, and the Senate leadership unable to reach an agreement with the sponsors on the procedure to bring either bill to the floor.
Meanwhile, the House has passed legislation similar to the Brownback-Landrieu bill, just as it did in 2001. H.R. 534, offered by Reps. Dave Weldon (R-FL) and Bart Stupak (D-MI), passed the House on February 27, after its supporters fought off a less restrictive substitute (H.R. 801) offered by Reps. James C. Greenwood (R-PA) and Peter Deutsch (D-FL) by a vote of 231-174.
Sen. Hatch, who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said at a March 20 hearing that his bill has "close to 60 votes," implying that passage of the Brownback-Landrieu bill would be impossible. The hearing featured several witnesses who have played prominent roles in the cloning debate, including Sen. Brownback, Dr. Leon Kass, the chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, and Dr. Paul Berg, a Stanford University nobel laureate who was active in the 1970s in developing regulations governing controversial research on recombinant DNA technology.
Among the issues discussed was a provision included in the Weldon-Stupak bill banning the importation of "any product derived from" a cloned human embryo. Sen. Hatch criticized this provision, saying it might prevent U.S. citizens from gaining access to medical treatments developed abroad. It was also criticized by Dr. Kass, who supports a ban on research cloning but described the provision as "problematic." Apparently responding to similar critiques last year, Sen. Brownback removed the importation provision from the latest version of his bill, which he introduced in January. Rep. Weldon had dropped it from the initial version of his bill (H.R. 234) as well, but reinserted it into the new version introduced just before it was considered by the House Judiciary Committee.
Sen. Brownback also changed his bill to add the cloning ban to the Public Health Service Act rather than the U.S. Penal Code. This allowed the bill to be referred to the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which is chaired by Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), who supports the bill and has indicated an intention to mark it up this summer. Previous versions had been referred to Sen. Hatch's Judiciary Committee, which plans to mark up S. 303 in the coming months.
A third committee, the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, has also gotten in on the act, as its Science, Technology and Space Subcommittee, chaired by Sen. Brownback, has held two hearings on the cloning issue, on January 30 and March 27. •••[an error occurred while processing this directive]