LETTERS: CLONING IS PART OF SLIPPERY SLOPE

To the editor:

In recent weeks we have read a lot about the scientific advances that have allowed mankind to clone Dolly the sheep and about the Chicago scientist who intends to clone human beings. Recently we read about an embryo that was kept on ice for seven years and then implanted in the mother's womb and grown until the time of its birth. How marvelous. Senate Democrats have introduced legislation to ban human cloning for only 10 years but allowing the cloning of human cells and tissues for research deemed invaluable in fighting disease and infertility.

Let's take a short journey into the past to see what the history of scientific research has brought us through the legalization of abortions in 1973.

By 1976 our nation's capital hospital was regularly doing abortions when some enterprising staff members came up with the brilliant idea of how to make extra money: Why not sell fetuses it had aborted -- fetuses that is had already been paid to abort?

In another hospital in the South, nurses said that fetuses were regularly packed in ice after abortions. "We wondered what happened to them, but we never asked, and we were never told."

At one time the U.S. Army, in one of its research centers, was having fetal internal organs such as livers and kidneys delivered to it from Korea to be used in manufacturing a virus that had struck down some troops during the Korean conflict.

After the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, American women began to provide a steady supply of the needed product. Doctors were encouraging abortions on women well beyond the third month of pregnancy, by which time parts of the embryo were notably developed and, of course, much more valuable for medical researchers. An international biological lab supplied all typed of biological material, including fetal, for experimentation. The then-director of the company said, "It's not the kind of thing one sees at the corner drugstore or supermarket," adding that it was vital all the same. He also said that a number of American companies were purchasing fetal material from pathologists for $20 to $25 a batch. Today that figure is allegedly $35 a batch, but no one seems willing to disclose how much is sold.

Ever since the scandal of the hospital in Washington that had profited from fetal sales, the trade has gone underground. Researchers operate on a closed circuit that is making arrangements with obstetricians and pathologists in their areas to get and prepare fetal organs for them upon abortion. Or they travel to foreign countries where obtaining fetuses is much easier.

I wonder why the scientific community seems to horrified at the idea of human cloning. This is just one more step along that slippery slope into our own manmade hell.

CHRISTINE E. STEPHENS

Cape Girardeau