X-Message-Number: 7818
Date: Fri, 07 Mar 1997 01:37:23 -0800
From: Loren Hardy <>
Subject: FYI:Clinton vs human cloning : Pres ignores self-ownership

>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: Wed, 05 Mar 1997 04:20:40 GMT
>From: Howard Olson <>
>To: "bionet.neuroscience mail newsgroup" <>
>Subject: Clinton vs human cloning : Pres ignores self-ownership
>
>
>	In a blatant display of political oportunism, President Clinton shows
>a sudden concern for ethics. He presumes to impose archaic
>authoritarian religious views in an attack on the forefront of modern
>science and the basis of all human rights : self-ownership.
>
>	Pandering to the worst reactionary authoritarian statist elements of
>the Millenium, Clinton seeks a "commission"  { an Inquisition is more
>like it) to study human cloning.
>
>	Clinton and those he seeks to appease on the statist Left & Right
>ignore the simple human fact of self-ownership. If human beings do not
>have the right to clone themselves they do not have the right to
>reproduce in any form without government consent. The level of
>techonology is irrelevant to the simple fact that humans have the
>right to dispose of their own tissue in any way they see fit. The
>alternative is state-ownership of human beings. This is unconscionable
>both ethically and scientifically.
>
>	Basic laws protect the rights of humans from enslavement  that
>opponents of human cloning pretend to fear in their simplistic
>propaganda. In reality, authoritarians of both the right and the left
>seek control over human life. Rulers and would-be rulers seek to use
>the issue of cloning to establish the principle of state-ownership of
>human life.
>
>	Niether scientists nor the public can allow this to happen. We need to
>have freedom to experiment so that viruses and all other infectious
>agents can be defeated as fast (or hopeully faster) than they can
>evolve. Limiting the rights of people to donate their tissue to
>medical science for these or any other purposes is to doom humanity to
>death from emergent viral and other pathogenic infections.
>Biotechnology and medicine in other areas may al;so benefit from human
>cloning in ways we cannot even imgaine now.
>
>	But , most importanly, banning human cloning will establish the right
>of the State to control human reproduction and human life in toto, by
>establishing the precedent created by such a law as Clinton and others
>are seeking.
>
>
>		Howard R. Olson, MA
>		Bioethicist
>
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