The man who cloned Dolly the sheep in the UK has been granted a license to clone human beings. That's right -- human beings.
This is a very disappointing news story from ABC News:
"The scientist who attracted the world's attention by cloning Dolly the Sheep is about to take another major step for medical research: cloning human embryos and extracting stem cells to unravel the mysteries of muscle-wasting illnesses like Lou Gehrig's disease.Ian Wilmut, who led the team that created Dolly at Scotland's Roslin Institute in 1996, was granted a cloning license Tuesday by British regulators to study how nerve cells go awry to cause motor neuron diseases."
You've got to love how the media eats up everything these researchers have to say; apparently, cloning will now enable us to unravel mysteries in the medical world! Um... hasn't anyone noticed that embryonic stem cell research has so far offered no new discoveries? Adult stem cells have, but not embryonic ones.These researchers are playing God by literally creating human beings, but they are not at all like God, because they quickly destroy their creations 'for the sake of medicine'! This is not right. The media must be stopped in its relentless attacks against life.
"The experiments do not involve creating cloned babies, but the license has nonetheless stirred fresh controversy over the issue and prompted abortion foes and other biological conservatives to condemn the decision."
There we go again: Pro-Lifers are 'abortion foes'. We are against a woman's so-called 'right to choose', and this makes us enemies. It makes us sound bad. Exactly what the media is going for: Demonize the opposition to make them look incompetent. They try to make well-written article such as this one from Catholic Answers look bad by making the people 'enemies'.
I am also stunned by the statement "the experiments do not involve creating cloned babies", because this statement is completely false. If I were the copy editor for ABC, I would fight to the bitter end to revoke that statement, because it is a complete lie. This is a huge problem in getting out the Pro-Life message, because people read these stories and become confused about what cloning actually is.
[Wilmut said,] "We all take for granted the very much healthier life that we have now compared with people 100 years ago," he said. "I think that the majority of people support this type of research and hope it will be successful in helping to bring useful treatment for diseases like motor neuron disease."
This is simply disgusting. The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it quite simply: "One may never do evil so that good may result from it" (#1789). The end does not justify the means, and if you think that destroying this man-made embryo is not murder, you are deceiving yourself. An embryo (or a pre-embryo, or whatever else the scientists want to call it) is a human being, and it should be treated as such.