Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-11-29-Speech-4-038"
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"en.20011129.1.4-038"2
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"Mr President, at a time when our fellow citizens are asking, now that we have created the Europe of merchandise, to construct a Europe of human beings, the embryo has come to the heart of Europe. At this point I should like to thank the President of the European Parliament for listening to the voices of some of us, following the British work last August authorising cloning for therapeutic purposes, and creating an ad hoc committee which, having held many hearings, gave rise to the Fiori report, which I welcome for its remarkable commitment to this subject.
Thus, contrary to other parliaments, such as the French Parliament, for example, we are meeting at the very moment when a private company announces that it has carried out human cloning, under cover of therapeutic purposes. I understand the objective, but we must be aware of the fact that this objective is really, underneath, an alibi, if we remember that there is another objective underlying it, that of the lure of immeasurable profits and potential markets.
What is the real issue here? In defiance of the principle of the inalienability and non-patrimoniality of the human body from the moment of conception onwards, which is laid down in all international declarations, it has been proposed that we should become what we are fighting against, organisms genetically modified by the uncontrolled creation of embryos as a source of spare parts for human bodies, thereby making it possible to repair sick people. We know that at any given moment in a decision-making process, there comes a time when it is necessary to look up from what we are doing and ask ourselves the question, ‘Shall I go on or shall I stop’. We believe that the time has come to set a limit, because the line between reproductive cloning and therapeutic cloning is a very thin one, since therapeutic cloning is, in fact, nothing more than interrupted reproductive cloning. I do not know whether I am on the side of ethics, but I am well aware, at any rate, that in expressing myself in this way I am not on the side of modernity. Such archaic classifications are irrelevant, because I believe that the real shock to civilisation lies among the modernists, those neo-scientists who believe that the human being is a material, and those who regard the human being as an essential resource for technical purposes. It was in that spirit that I tabled Amendment No 213 on the non-patentability of living beings, like Amendment No 212, showing that there is no difference between therapeutic and non-therapeutic cloning. It is also in that spirit that I appeal to the President of the European Parliament to allow our committee to become a permanent one, and I appeal to the President of the Commission to involve the parliaments of Europe in bioethics, so as not to deprive the public of this debate, and finally I appeal to the Heads of State and Government to commit to an international convention on bioethics."@en1
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