Pro-life groups and churches have united in support of LB700, a bill in the Nebraska Legislature to ban all forms of human cloning.

“The cloning of human beings for any reason is wrong and should be banned in Nebraska,” said Greg Schleppenbach, director of pro-life activities for the Nebraska Catholic Conference at a news conference Tuesday morning in the rotunda of the state Capitol.

“Cloning dehumanizes human procreation and treats human beings as laboratory products, as nothing more than carriers of traits that others find useful.”

The bill, introduced by Sen. Mark Christensen of Imperial, would prohibit both reproductive and therapeutic cloning.

The bill would make it illegal to use stem cells harvested from cloned embryos for research purposes but would not prohibit the use of existing stem cell lines that are allowed under current federal guidelines and rules adopted by the University of Nebraska’s Board of Regents, Schleppenbach said.

The legislation would not ban the use of cloning techniques to produce molecules, tissues, organs or cells other than human embryos or animals other than humans. It would do nothing to curtail adult stem cell research, Christensen said at the news conference.

“This is not an anti-research bill. It is a bill that will focus our efforts on life-affirming research, not abusive or destructive research.”

Groups and churches supporting LB700 include Nebraska Right to Life, Nebraskans United for Life, the Bishops’ Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities (Catholic Conference), Lincoln Area Lutherans for Life, Family First, Nebraska Family Council, Vital Signs Ministries and state leaders of Assemblies of God and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.

Other churches are expected to join the coalition, Schleppenbach said. “I think you’ll find a very unified religious group, supporting life.”

The bill would lay down “a clear ethical boundary that rejects the manufacturing of human embryos through cloning solely to be destroyed for research,” he said. “By failing to enact LB700, the Legislature would give a green light to this violation of human dignity and human rights.”

Proponents of research cloning use technical terms, such as “somatic cell nuclear transfer,” to make the process more publicly acceptable, Schleppenbach said. But he stressed that producing a cloned embryo for reproductive purposes and artificially creating an embryo for stem cell research is exactly the same process, and both raise serious ethical questions. “The only difference is what you do with that embryo.”

“What value is it to create life and kill it?” Christensen asked. “God is the creator of life.”

The bill is opposed by Nebraskans For Research, whose executive director, Sandy Goodman, offered comments after the news conference.  

“There is no dispute that human reproductive cloning is dangerous and unethical,” Goodman said. But LB700 would go beyond that by banning “promising medical research involving embryonic stem cells” that could lead to cures for debilitating diseases and save human lives, he said.

Goodman believes the majority of Americans oppose restrictions on stem cell research. The potential benefits of such research should not be blocked by what are essentially religious arguments, he said.

“Unlike the issue of slavery, involving as it did millions of living, breathing human beings of all ages, the subject of dispute today is more an abstract principle, involving as it does a few hundred undifferentiated stem cells in a petri dish. People understand intuitively that those cells have a different moral status than a child with cystic fibrosis.”

Bills were introduced in the Legislature both four years ago and two years ago to ban cloning, but both bills failed to pass, Schleppenbach said. The coalition will send information to churches, other religious groups and pro-life leaders around the state asking them to urge senators to support the bill.

“We know it will be a tough fight,” he said.

Reach Bob Reeves at 473-7212 or breeves@journalstar.com.