Hatch Supports Measure on Cloning

WASHINGTON — In the well-worn trenches of the abortion battle, Republican Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) has been a reliable fighter for the unborn. By supporting a ban on federal funding for abortion and a constitutional amendment to overturn Roe vs. Wade, Hatch has argued for protecting the embryo as it grows in the womb.

But on Tuesday, the Utah lawmaker broke with his antiabortion allies and threw his support to a bill that would allow scientists to create human embryos through cloning, then destroy them in the course of medical research. With the Senate vote on cloning too close to call, the support of a conservative, antiabortion lawmaker gave a significant boost to those who want to preserve cloning as a legal technique in research.

It also showed how science has forced lawmakers to think in new ways about whether a human embryo is a human life. In essence, Hatch said, an embryo in the womb is a human being, deserving of protection. But an embryo created through cloning is not, he said, and may be destroyed to help find cures for disease.

Cloning for research “is pro-life and pro-family,” Hatch told a news conference. “It enhances--it does not diminish--human life.” He said that “a critical part of being pro-life is to support measures that help the living.”

The stance is sure to earn the senator animosity from the antiabortion movement. But analysts in Utah said that Hatch is so popular, the political risks are low. He belongs to the Mormon Church, which has no specific teaching on cloning.

The fight over cloning is one of the most emotional issues before Congress this year. There is broad support for banning cloning to produce children, but division over whether to bar scientists from trying to make cloned embryos for their stem cells, which in turn might be fashioned into cures for disease.

The House already has voted to bar all human cloning, and antiabortion groups have made a total cloning ban their top legislative issue this year. Last month, President Bush called for a total ban, saying that cloning would lead “toward a society in which human beings are grown for spare body parts, and children are engineered to custom specifications.”

But senators are thought to be evenly split on whether to bar cloning in research laboratories. Each side claims support from about 45 senators, leaving about 10 undecided.

“Sen. Hatch has stature as a conservative Republican, and his support certainly makes it easier for others to come to our side,” said Sean Tipton, spokesman for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, which supports cloning for medical research. Among the undecided are antiabortion Sens. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), John McCain (R-Ariz.) and John B. Breaux (D-La.).

Hatch, who also supports federally funded stem cell research, announced his position Tuesday in an article he wrote for a home state paper, the Salt Lake Tribune, and at a news conference where he and three other senators introduced a bill to allow cloning in research. The bill sets fines and jail time for anyone who transfers a cloned embryo to a womb to produce a child.

The bill will compete with one sponsored by Sens. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and Mary Landrieu (D-La.) that would bar cloning for any purpose, mirroring the measure that passed the House last summer.

“My decision came after countless hours of study, reflection and, yes, prayer,” Hatch said. He added: “Once I identified and weighed what I believe to be the relevant factors, the decision itself was not--and I repeat not--a close call.”

Hatch did not mention Bush by name, but his speech offered a response to the dark vision of research cloning laid out by the president. The technique, he said, could “help over 100 million Americans who are struggling with the day-to-day challenges, currently, of incurable disease.” Banning it, he said would be “a tragic mistake.”

Hatch said his Mormon beliefs led him to oppose cloning as a reproductive technique. “This would directly intervene with God’s sacred plan for human reproduction by a man and a woman within the bonds of marriage,” he said.

Hatch also said he believes that human life begins “in a mother’s nurturing womb,” not in a laboratory dish. But cloning produces something different: embryos that are not intended to be placed in a womb, and that are created by merging an egg and an adult cell, without fertilization by sperm.

He said this type of cloning produced “living cells,” but not human beings. Hatch called the product of cloning an “unfertilized, electronically activated embryo,” language that antiabortion groups said was intended to play down the humanity of the embryo. Hatch also said he preferred the term “regenerative medicine” to “cloning,” a word that some people believe carries unpleasant connotations.

Last year, Hatch took a similar stance in the debate over federal funding for stem cell research using embryos created and frozen at fertility clinics. Those embryos, he said then, were not equivalent to human beings because they had not been placed in a womb.

Hatch’s support for stem cell research was a boost for research advocates. After announcing his stance, he appeared often on television to advocate stem cell research.

Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, questioned Hatch’s view of the embryo. Cloning, he said, produces “a self-directed organism that is a member of the species Homo sapiens.... If a child was born from it, would Sen. Hatch say that child was not a human being?”

Michael Otterson, a spokesman for the Mormon Church, said that the church had no comment on Hatch’s announcement and that it had issued no policy on cloning. In 1995, church leaders issued a statement on the family that said: “The sacred powers of procreation are to be employed only between man and woman, lawfully wedded as husband and wife.”

Church spokesmen declined to say whether creating a cloned embryo was considered a form of procreation.

The church did not criticize Hatch after he supported stem cell research last year, issuing instead a statement that said the research merited “cautious scrutiny.”

Ted Wilson, a former mayor of Salt Lake City who teaches political science at the University of Utah, said Hatch’s stance would cost him little at home. “Orrin is beyond worrying about costs,” said Wilson, who ran against Hatch in 1982 as a Democrat. “He’s so well established as a conservative Republican. He leans liberal on several occasions, and so he even engages a certain amount of Democratic support.”

Randy Simmons, chairman of the political science department at Utah State University in Logan, said Hatch “likes to show he’s unpredictable and not a right-wing crazy, which is what people sometimes try to do when they run against him. I don’t see how this hurts him.”