Clinton Proposes Human Cloning Ban, More Study

President Clinton said Monday he wants to ban the cloning of human beings but to allow some cloning research while Americans debate the moral implications.

The president proposed legislation that would ban cloning “for the purposes of creating a child.” It would direct the National Bioethics Advisory Commission to report in 4 1/2 years on whether the ban should continue.

Clinton stopped short of banning the cloning of animals and certain human genes for important biomedical research. “There is nothing inherently immoral or wrong with these new techniques, used for proper purposes,” he said during a Rose Garden ceremony to receive the commission’s report.

Clinton urged private researchers to avoid attempting to clone a human baby, saying that threatens “the sacred family bonds at the very core of our ideals and our society.”

Clinton’s proposal is based on the bioethics panel’s conclusion that it is “morally unacceptable” to create a child through somatic-cell nuclear transfer cloning and implant it into a woman’s body for delivery.

British and Scottish scientists used such a process to create Dolly, a sheep, the first mammal cloned from adult cells.

Before Dolly was born healthy and normal, her creator had failed 277 times. Some of the duplicate lambs were born with severe and lethal birth defects.