WASHINGTON, June 9, 1997 (UPI) -- President Clinton is urging Congress to ban human cloning, saying it reflects ''our humanity and it is the right thing to do.'' The president staged a Rose Garden ceremony today to publicly accept the findings of The National Bioethics Advisory Commission, which has unanimously recommended a new federal law banning creating human babies through cloning.
The proposed legislation would not restrict research in other areas of biomedical and agricultural research that involves cell transfer or cloning technologies used for DNA or cloning to create animals.
Clinton said, ''More and more, the scientific community will influence the course of the future and the lives that our children will lead in the new century that is upon us.''
He noted that for three months the panel ''has rigorously explored the scientific, moral and spiritual dimensions of human cloning.''
Clinton stressed that the commission had ''talked to leading scientists and religious leaders, to philosophers and families, to patient advocates and to the general public.'' From those conversations and study, he says, the commission unanimously decided that ''attempting to clone a human being is unacceptably dangerous to the child and morally unacceptable to our society.''
