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Clone Rights United Front
When? Where? How? UPDATE |
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The following letter written to a media researcher expands on the ideas discussed in the forgoing section; "WHEN? WHERE? HOW?" - December, 9 1999. I am here at the Clone Rights United Front headquarters in New York City every day between 3 and 8 pm. I'm usually here later. I know there is a great time difference, but I can be reached at 1-212-255-1439. Our new website is www.clonerights.com From Europe, I am not sure that you have to use the www part or is it the http:// that you drop. In any event, at www.clonerights.com you will find my own predictions of "When Where and How" under "editorials". I intend to update this article in the near future. Mark Eibert, an attorney in California gave a compelling presentation to the California Cloning Committee on May 15,2000. On page 25 he declares: "Second, because not all infertile people I meet in the pro-choice movement need outside help to do cloning for themselves or others who share their plight. I have met infertile physicians, infertile scientists and infertile biotech executives who have a huge person stake in seeing cloning technology developed, who already possess the training and skills and resources needed to make cloning a reality. And what some people mistakenly call the "therapeutic" and agricultural cloning industries are improving the technology and training more and more people how to use it every day. That's the trouble with with trying to oppress a minority that consists of ten to fifteen percent of the population and looks just like everybody else. Infertile people are everywhere, and they know everything that everybody else knows. Anybody who thinks that if we just word the statute carefully enough, or make the statutory penalties vicious enough, we can have a future full of cloned human kidneys and cloned human bladders and cloned human embryos for stem cell research, but "not" cloned human beings, is incredibly naive. Once science discovers something, it is there for everyone." I would suggest you get a copy of his presentation. Mark Eibert can be reached at markeibert@home.com I know a number of people who want to be cloned for different reasons. Canadian Public television was here recently and interviewed four of us. My own personal reasons for wanting to be cloned are spelled out in an unedited exchange between a young woman and myself to be found under "personalizing the issues" at www.clonerights.com I have a two hour videotape which includes Karen Latimer talking with French TV about her desire to be cloned. It might have been with the BBC but I think I was the one highlighted in that report. I have a fat file of "cloning applicants" but many of them want to clone children who recently died, use cloning as a means to solve their infertility problems, or to use stem cell technology to regenerate some part of their body which is failing.. I think someone already has or is in the process of having a desired child through cloning. I am now convinced that it is an infertile fertility doctor, half of whom are female, who will undertake this venture because they feel it is their moral and reproductive right to do so. We didn't hear about the birth of Dolly, born July 5,1996 until the very end of February 1997. I would not be surprised that the first "publicized case or cases of human cloning will later be found not to have been the first at all. I will refer you to an amazing historic precedent. In 1860, an Alabama physician J. Marion Sims inseminated wives with their husband's sperm in attempts to overcome infertility. Producing one pregnancy this way, Sims was universally condemned for tying to produce babies "unnaturally" and for assisting women to commit "adultery"" (Sims later founded the specialty of gynecology and, in New York City, the first hospital for women.) Actually, the foregoing is lifted directly from Dr. Gregory Pence's book "RE-CREATING MEDICINE Ethical Issues at the Frontiers of Medicine", Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, (British address: 12 Hid's Copse road, Cumnor Hill, Oxford OX2 9JJ, England) If you go to page 75, you will read about how he was vilified for these efforts by press and clergy alike. Let me quote the appropriate paragraphs. "In the 1890s, Brooklyn physician Robert Latou Dickinson was vilified for practicing AID He preserved but was still accused of aiding and abetting "technological adultery." (Dickinson was also an early pioneer of contraception.) earlier, in 1984, Dr. William Pancoast had secretly implanted the wife of an infertile couple with the sp[erm of a medical student. the student-turned-physician revealed the incident decades later, claiming it as the first case of artificial insemination, which it probably was not, but it was certainly the first "Published" account. (20) Unfortunately, although the husband knew Dr. Pancoast had not used his sperm, the wife did not. News of the successful event in 1909 caused outrage (not because the wife had been deceived but because of the "unnaturalness" of the activities). I can easily imagine just such a situation developing about cloning. after someone has become world famous for being the first (of many) children conceived through cloning, some one will stand up twenty or thirty years later and announce that he or she had, in fact, been the first. One only wonders how this type of "history" will be managed. we know "intellectually" that Leif Erickson was most probably the first person to discover America but Columbus was so "established" that he has never been replaced. However, we can ascertain through DNA testing if someone really is the later born twin of another. It would not be an argument. It would be a matter of fact. At this moment, I only know that Dr. Raz Kuldeep is trying to raise financial backing to open a clinic for human cloning in India. we also have The Raelians, a New Age Religion, claiming to have gotten $500,000 from the parents of a ten month old child in order to clone their deceased one. I know the Raelians well. Individually, their members are wonderful, charming, intelligent people. However, I feel that their leader Rael is a man trapped by his own illusion. I feel that they are being very exploitative of (1) parents with dying children by urging them to contact them so as to arrange for the cloning of their child after death for $250,000; (2) holding a press conference in San Francisco saying that they could clone a child by mixing the genes of two males after a British researcher merely theorized that such a thing might be possible "some day in the future", and (3) taking advantage of the wonderful warm and loving and giving nature of the many young women in their group who are willing to be egg donors and surrogate mothers. And all of this is being done, not to give infertile couples children or replace lost offspring, it is being done as part of grand scheme to promote their prophet "Rael". If they succeed, and they seem to have the math on their side--money, egg donors, surrogate mothers, contacts in countries all around the world-I will try to send you a Washington Post story outlining all of this- then Rael who is considered a "crazy space-cadet cult leader" by most people will be on the cover of every magazine in the world holding the first child conceived through cloning. As Rael and I talked during one of his first press conferences here in NYC in 1997, I told him that whenever I grew weary and depressed and wondered how cloning would ultimately triumph, I realized that those children conceived through cloning, the first dozen or two, would grip the attention and imagination of the world. The public would probably fall in love with many of them, perhaps not like some, but all-in-all, the children conceived through cloning would win the hearts and minds of all humankind in this controversy. Rael agreed, saying what I said in a lovely and succinct fashion. "Yes," Rael told me, "I see myself standing there with this beautiful baby in my arms. And you know, there is nothing the whole world loves more than a beautiful little baby." So, I cannot write forever. I hope you will go beyond this limited and mindless 'WHO IS DOING IT/ WHERE IS IT BEING DONE? ETC. If you just read my essay: "Human Cloning: A Promising Cornucopia" under "History of the Movement" at the www.,clonerights.com site or under the "Publish your Essays here in Support of Human Cloning" at www.humancloning.org you will begin to glimpse the really profound and new frontiers ahead. Cloningly yours, Randolfe H. Wicker Director, Human Cloning Foundation Founder, Clone Rights United Front Please return to Clone Rights United Front index Back to Top or visit our sister sites The Reproductive Cloning Network at http://www.reproductivecloning.net or The Human Cloning Foundation's Home Page at: http://www.humancloning.org |