You may recall that a few weeks back, Idea Log discussed how the left
wing environmental group Friends of the Earth had thrown in its lot with
conservative anti-abortionists on the issue of reproductive cloning. The
two strange bedfellows came together to oppose the middle-of-the road
Feinstein-Kennedy bill now in the Senate, which would ban human
reproductive cloning but would not limit the therapeutic cloning of human
embryos for research purposes.
You can rest assured that FoE’s overture did not go unnoticed or
unappreciated on the “pro-life” front.
Arguing against Senator Dianne Feinstein on Meet the Press this
weekend, Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) — the antiabortionist author of
a more extreme bill to ban both reproductive and therapeutic cloning — did
far more than merely tip his hat to his new left-wing environmentalist
allies. Indeed, Brownback hardly even made a conservative pro-life argument
against therapeutic cloning, he was so busy making liberal anti-corporate ones.
This may seem an odd approach for the Kansas senator, whose website
blazons his support for the “right to life” and also contains an exceedingly weird photograph of what appear to be two
twins on its cloning page. The graphic suggests that Brownback labors
under the delusion that human clones will be the same as identical
twins. The reality, of course, is that although a human clone would indeed
be genetically identical to its “clonee,” it would grow up separated by
both years and geography and environment. Thus, the two would probably
have very little in common.
On Meet the Press, however, Brownback didn’t mention
twins. Instead, following in the footsteps of Friends of the Earth, his
main case against therapeutic cloning took an explicitly anti-business
tack, one that almost entirely masked the religious worship of the embryo
that actually underlies his position. In Brownback’s own words:
And at the fundamentals of it, we’ve got to ask ourselves what
is a young human? I mean, is it a person or is it a piece of property? The
Feinstein bill would say that until you plant it in the uterus, this is a
piece of property, you can research on it.
And again:
We have strong support from environmental groups, from women’s
health organizations that don’t want to see this be exploitive of women.
The environmental groups are very concerned about the commodification of
the human species, and, Tim, truly, we’re talking about a grave issue for
humanity.
Note the near-Chomskyite code words here: “property,” “exploitive,” and
especially “commodification.” Brownback sounds just like Friends of the
Earth president Brent Blackwelder, who testified before the Senate recently
that the “push to redesign human beings, animals and plants to meet the
commercial goals of a limited number of individuals is fundamentally at
odds with the principle of respect for nature.”
But if Idea Log is being hard on Friends of the Earth, we ought to be
even harder on the feminists who pretend to stand up for a woman’s right to
choose but have also allied themselves with Brownback on the cloning
issue. These include the Our Bodies, Ourselves author Judy
Norsigian, co-founder of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. Like
Brownback, this organization worries that therapeutic cloning has “profound
implications for the future of humanity,” and fears that “cloning would
place undue health burdens on women as well as turn our eggs and wombs into
commodities.”
And Dianne Feinstein notwithstanding, not all female elected
representatives are setting a good example for these women’s groups. Mary
Landrieu, the pro-choice Democratic Senator from Louisiana, recently became
a co-sponsor of Brownback’s anti-research bill (and
thereby a direct opponent of Feinstein in the Senate). According to
Landrieu’s press release, “Among the many concerns cloning opponents have
is that vulnerable, low income women could be used as harvest tools.”
Landrieu shows little concern, however, that liberal feminist sentiments
might be used as pro-life tools; or that an anti-corporate position
on therapeutic cloning is also an anti-research one. But you can bet that
Senator Sam Brownback loves and dotes on his new environmentalist and
feminist allies, almost like a new father. Heck, he might even like to
clone some of them. Those that aren’t already twins, anyway.
