SPUC welcomes delay to defective UN cloning ban

London, 6 November 2002--The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) has welcomed the US-led delay to a Franco-German proposal for a United Nations ban on cloning humans with the intention of their being born.

Speaking from Brussels, Peter Smith, SPUC's representative at the UN, said: "This is a crucial victory. A ban on so-called reproductive cloning would have given a signal to countries such as Germany to change their laws to allow so-called therapeutic human cloning, which always involves the destruction of human embryos.

"Germany has laws which explicitly ban human cloning for any purpose. The German delegation's tactic here seems to have been to obtain an international agreement to ban human cloning for birth only so that Germany could then use the excuse of compliance with this agreement to open its laws to allow cloning for research. Such unethical research would involve the deliberate creation, manipulation and destruction of human beings.

"We agree with the United States that it is preferable to have no agreement than an unethical one."