HUMAN CLONING ENDANGERS HUMANITY
AND SHOULD BE PROHIBITED -- PIMENTEL

Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Nene Q. Pimentel, Jr. (PDP-Laban) today called for universal action to prohibit the cloning of human beings which he said has the potential to destroy the human race.

Pimentel said cloning of human beings, which some scientists are now experimenting on, should be banned not only by imposing legal barriers but also by condemning it as an immoral undertaking.

I guess the ultimate brake on those horribly wicked experiments would have to be the acceptance of the notion that it is immoral to clone other human beings, he said in a paper presented at the International Conference on Bioethics and the Family at the EDSA Shangri-La Hotel in Mandaluyong City.

To make the moral premise effective, he said intra-national sanctions must be imposed on scientists who do it and companies, firms or associations that fund their research.

Pimentel said cloning, as a means of creating other human beings, would eliminate man from his vital role as the indispensable partner of woman in the preservation of the human race.

I cannot help but express the anxiety that cloning would make man as man an endangered species. It would also make woman superior to man in that by cloning, human embryos, one needs only a womans womb to perpetuate a race of cloned individuals. That would make life more complicated than it really is because the proposition that woman is equal to man is quite reasonably acceptable but to say that woman is superior to man is highly questionable and may take time for us, men to adjust to, he said.

Unless checked, human cloning would lead to the perdition of humanity because it directly undermines the family that is the bedrock of humankind, the lone senator from Mindanao said.

Unless individual nations criminalize such a family life-threatening proposition, human cloning will soon be as easily available to those who want it as hotdogs sold by ambulant vendors at any street corner. No one nation, however, can prevent, much less, put an end to this neo-Nazi thesis of cloning that some scientists unabashedly propagate as the means of producing such a super race, he said.

Happily, Pimentel said 46 countries including Germany, France, Belgium, Denmark, Holland, Russia and Japan, prohibit human cloning in various ways.

In the same paper, entitled Biotechnology: For Good or Ill is the Question, Pimentel also rejected the abominable theory that it is all right to kill a human embryo for the avowed purpose of finding cures for various ailments of humankind.

He said the idea of allowing the killing of a human embryo even for medical purposes is not only morally abhorrent but also a criminal offense under the countrys penal laws.

For this reason, Pimentel said he cannot find any justification for stem cell research that takes certain tissues from a human embryo and cause the latter to die.

If we believe that life begins at conception, no adequate reason exists to justify the use of genetic engineering biotechnology that makes life away from an embryo in the guise of scientific advancement or under any other alibi, he said.

The human embryo pulsates with life of a human being, a distinct individual, with his or her own human characteristics and an immortal soul that set him or her apart from all others. That, I believe, is Gods design for human life.

Pimentel said to snuff the life out of a helpless embryo in the name of medical research is more reprehensible than the outright execution of an adult criminal in the name of state law.