Leon Kass on Cloning

In the Weekly Standard, Leon Kass has an article entitled Defending Life and Dignity: How, finally, to ban human cloning in which he lays out his ideas on how our nation can ban human cloning. He thinks his solution will somehow work both for individuals who want to ban human cloning (regardless of whether it is for reproductive or research purposes) and for individuals who want to keep human cloning for research purposes legal. Difficult, no? How can you satisfy two groups who want two profoundly different things?

Kass writes,

Second, we should call for a legislative ban on all attempts to conceive a child save by the union of egg and sperm (both taken from adults). This would ban human cloning to produce children, but also other egregious forms of baby making that would deny children a link to two biological parents, one male and one female, both adults. This approach differs from both the Kennedy-Feinstein-Hatch and the Brownback-Landrieu bills, yet it could--and should--gain support from people previously on both sides. It pointedly neither endorses nor restricts creating cloned embryos for research: Cloning embryos for research is no longer of such interest to scientists; therefore, it is also no longer, as a practical matter, so important to the pro-life cause. Moreover, the prohibited deed, operationally, should be the very act of creating the conceptus (with intent to transfer it to a woman for pregnancy), not, as the Kennedy-Feinstein-Hatch bill would have it, the transfer of the proscribed conceptus to the woman, a ban that would have made it a federal offense not to destroy the newly created cloned human embryos. The ban proposed here thus deserves the support of all, regardless of their position on embryo research.

Is anyone else scratching their head? Maybe Kass is going over my head here but his language seems to confuse what he's actually proposing.

On one hand, "a legislative ban on all attempts to conceive a child save by the union of egg and sperm" sounds to me like something which would ban the creation of human clones since they are conceived in a different way than the union of egg and sperm. But then Kass writes, "It pointedly neither endorses nor restricts creating cloned embryos for research." Huh? Wouldn't a legislative ban on conceiving a child by an alternative means (other than egg and sperm) including conceiving a child by cloning (using egg, a somatic cell, chemicals, and an electric charge)?

Is Kass using the term conceive to mean "implant?" But wouldn't that have the same effect as the Kennedy-Feinstein-Hatch legislation which he's against?

Maybe this sentence gets to the heart of what Kass is advocating:

Moreover, the prohibited deed, operationally, should be the very act of creating the conceptus (with intent to transfer it to a woman for pregnancy), not, as the Kennedy-Feinstein-Hatch bill would have it, the transfer of the proscribed conceptus to the woman, a ban that would have made it a federal offense not to destroy the newly created cloned human embryos.

So it seems that Kass is saying we should ban the creation of human embryos via cloning if the intent of the researchers is to transfer the clone into a woman's womb but keep the creation of human embryos via cloning legal if the intent of the researchers is to kill the embryos for research. To me, this only differs semantically (and not operationally) from the Kennedy-Feinstein-Hatch legislation.

But then Kass goes on to call for a separate bill which would create a 4-5 year moratorium on the creation of any kind of embryo solely for research (including creating cloned human embryos).

We should call for a (four- or five-year) moratorium on all de novo creation--by whatever means--of human embryos for use in research. This would block the creation of embryos for research not only by cloning (or SCNT), the goal of the Brownback-Landrieu anti-cloning bill, but also by IVF.

Thoughts?