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BDF Brief Puts President's Council on Bioethics Report in Mo. Cures Without Cloning Court Case |
BDF Brief on Misleading Human Cloning Ballot Summary
* READ THE BRIEF
March 21, 2008. Today, BDF filed an amicus brief in the case of Cures Without Cloning v. Carnahan regarding a Missouri ballot initiative to ban the production of human embryos by cloning for any purpose.
BDF represented President's Council on Bioethics member Robby George -- a Princeton professor, and Dr. Maureen Condic, a researcher and embryology professor at the University of Utah School of Medicine.
The brief urges the appellate court to affirm the victory for pro-life groups in which the trial court found the Secretary of State's summary statement to be "insufficient and unfair."
The Secretary’s summary statement avoided the term “human embryo” which is critical to the initiative’s purpose, and revealed patent bias and favoritism against passage of the Cures Without Cloning initiative. Among other things, the summary failed to distinguish between the two purposes of human cloning when she claimed that the initiative "repeals the current ban on human cloning" -- vaguely referring to the 2006 amendment that banned the birth of cloned children but which protected the production of human embryos by cloning to be destroyed in experimentation.
The case squarely presents the Missouri appellate court with a matter of nationwide significance that strikes at the heart of democracy in a pluralistic society: the importance of the judiciary in protecting citizens’ rights to accurate and unbiased terminology regarding voter initiatives so as to facilitate fair, accurate and frank public debate – especially regarding issues that are new to the public square such as the controversial practice of producing human embryos by cloning to be destroyed for embryonic stem cell research.
The amicus brief presented the court with the President's Council on Bioethics Report on human cloning, which emphasized the importance of objective terminology distinguishing the two purposes of human cloning -- "cloning to produce children" and "cloning for biomedical research."
Read the Brief here: http://www.bdfund.org/amici.pdf
For more information on the Cures Without Cloning initiative, go to www.nocloning.org.
Bioethics Defense Fund contact
Dorinda C. Bordlee, Esq.
dbordlee@bdfund.org
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