It's a Bird. . . It's a Plane. . . It's Superclone
By Katha Pollitt,
The Nation
| 08. 06. 2001
Our fears about human cloning are unfounded and naive
Is human cloning a feminist issue? Two cloning bans are currently
winding their way through Congress: In the Senate, the Human
Cloning Prohibition Act seeks to ban all cloning of human cells,
while a House version leaves a window open for cloning stem
cells but bans attempts to create a cloned human being. Since
both bills are the brainchildren of anti-choice Republican yahoos,
who have done nothing for women's health or rights in their
entire lives, I was surprised to get an e-mail inviting me to
sign a petition supporting the total ban, organized by feminist
heroine Judy Norsigian of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective
(the producers of Our Bodies, Ourselves) and signed by Ruth
Hubbard, Barbara Seaman, Naomi Klein and many others (you can
find it at www.gene-watch.org).
Are feminists so worried about "creating a duplicate human"
that they would ban potentially useful medical research? Isn't that
the mirror image of anti-choice attempts to block research using stem
cells from embryos created during in vitro fertilization?
My antennae...
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