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.
