Your view: More on the issue

The campaign presently being waged by Missourian for Lifesaving Cures is misleading voters by not providing the full story about human cloning, embryonic stem cell research and the exploitation of women through egg harvesting. While Paul Harvey's radio show always includes the segment "The Rest of the Story", voters in Missouri are not getting the "rest of the story."

Cloning proponents want to place in the Missouri Constitution the right to clone and then destroy human life at the earliest stage of development - the human embryo. They claim the proposed amendment does not affect human embryos. Of course, this is false. As the term itself implies, embryonic stem cell research involves experiments with human embryos and those experiments end up destroying human life.

Cloning proponents are not telling the "rest of the story" in other ways, too. For example, they don't like to talk about the fact that embryonic stem cell research requires researchers to obtain a large quantity of human eggs. And they gloss over the fact that to get these eggs researchers must ask women to undergo medically risky procedures that can cause health complications including infertility and even death.

Cloning proponents claim their proposal does not involve human cloning, but this is false. What they have done is propose a new and scientifically inaccurate definition of human cloning that fails to include all of the current cloning technologies such as somatic cell nuclear transfer. In order to obtain the embryonic stem cells they need for research, scientists must clone the embryo and then tear the embryo apart. That destroys human life at the earliest stage of development.

The sad thing is we don't need this constitutional amendment. Morally acceptable adult stem cell research has successfully treated over 70 diseases. Here in Missouri the St. Louis Cardinal Glennon Children's Hospital takes umbilical cord blood and stores it in a blood bank. Stem cells derived from this blood bank are offering effective medical treatments right now to many Missourians. Meanwhile embryonic stem cell research has yet to produce one single cure in more than twenty years of animal research.

What makes all of this even more tragic is that our tax dollars could be used to support this unethical research. Yes, technically, the proposed amendment does not raise taxes, but it will allow cloning experiments to take place at tax supported colleges and universities. And passage of the amendment would also send a signal to the state legislature to fund this immoral research out of state general revenue.

Missouri should not follow the lead of California and create a constitutional right to human cloning. Instead, Missouri should show the rest of the nation that there is a right way to conduct stem cell research using adult stem cells.

Clem Scheffer Jr.