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# Posted 7:45 AM by Anonymous

MORE ON CLONING. In the Washington Post, Richard Cohen's op-ed makes the somewhat obvious but rarely discussed point:

"In general, if you scratch an anti-cloner you will find someone opposed to abortion."

What the current debate over the Brownback Bill and surrounding issues of human cloning leave out is open, candid debate over the real topic at stake.

However, while the debate has strong undertones of abortion politics, a large factor is language used. Like the pro-choice groups that freak out every time a new bill reaches the floor, insinuating that a fetus has a higher person-status than a group of cells, the anti-cloners freak out that allowing medical research using human cells will necessarily lead to the destruction of our understanding of babies as with rights. But not all slopes are slippery. Just because you use politically-charged language in one bill doesn't revoke a Supreme Court decision. And really, neither does it change public opinion. Allowing cloning for research on human cells doesn't mean that human life has lost all its value. It's not that it's unimportant whether a fetus is given fourteenth amendment rights or whether we allow human cell clusters to be cloned, in fact in certain ways, it is. It is that these semantic debates are not really about what they are about. There are much larger (and more significant) ideological issues at stake, and it's high time we stop pretending that it matters whether a "fetus" was "conceived" when DNA was inserted into its nucleus, or what we should really call a cluster of cells.

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