Proposed Missouri Amendment 2: Pro human cloning?

Watch the below video, and read the text (all the way through, even the fine print) of Amendment 2 and see for yourself. This is the amendment that Senator Talent opposes on grounds that it makes human cloning legal in Missouri. It’s the same amendment that demagogue Claire McCaskill uses to accuse Senator Talent of essentially being against cures for diseases.

If what the lady in the video is saying is true, pro-embryonic stem cell advocates are involved in committing a major fraud against Missourians. I’m not familiar with some of the terms used in the text of the amendment, so I’m hoping people more familiar with them can help out.

BTW, Robert Novak believes Amendment 2 is a fraud – here’s what he wrote about it.

Hat tip: The Chatterbox Chronicles

Update: WOW. This site provides a wealth of information on this issue. Like this, for example:

The lawyers who wrote Amendment 2 work for giant biotechnology labs that plan to make billions of dollars by cloning humans for research. They wanted to guarantee that Missouri lawmakers could never outlaw it. But they knew that most Missourians oppose the idea of creating and destroying human life in a laboratory.

How did Amendment 2’s slick promoters get around this? Simple. Instead of being honest about their objective, they came up with a phony definition of “cloning” and pretended to ban it.

The operation used to clone human beings for research is called “Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer.” This involves combining a woman’s egg with the nucleus of another living cell. The result is a human embryo. Two weeks later, stem cells are “harvested” from that embryo, and it’s destroyed.

Backers of Amendment 2 claim that this isn’t “cloning.” But practically every scientific authority disagrees with them, including the National Academies of Science and the American Medical Association. And a Missouri Appeals Court Judge wrote in March 2006 that “Nuclear transfer is cloning.”

Amendment 2 doesn’t actually “ban human cloning.” It protects it.

NRO:

The initiative doesn’t ban cloning. It bans only the implantation of a cloned embryo into a woman’s womb to initiate a pregnancy. In other words, it outlaws the development of a cloned embryo into a cloned baby: You can create a cloned human embryo as long as you kill it during research. (If artificial wombs can be made to work, however, the law would allow even for cloned babies.)

Saturday update: See my follow-up post on this issue here.