ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Thursday, Oct. 18 2007

Carnahan fumbles again in Missouri's cloning battle
By Colleen Carroll Campbell

Two years ago, when Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan was drafting a
ballot summary for Amendment Two, she faced a decision.

The amendment's billionaire backers and their allies had sent her a 99-word
suggested summary to describe their nearly 2,000-word initiative. The
initiative would create a constitutional right to clone and kill human embryos
for research. But their summary made no mention of embryos, and its only
reference to cloning said the amendment would ban the practice — a blatant
contradiction of the fine print that allowed somatic cell nuclear transfer, or
SCNT, the process used to create cloned embryos.

As secretary of state, Carnahan is charged with writing ballot summaries that
use fair and plain language to describe ballot initiatives. Impartiality in the
task is crucial, because the ballot summary is the only information about an
initiative that voters see in the voting booth.

Carnahan failed voters on Amendment Two. Rather than rewriting the deceptive
language submitted by its advocates, she adopted it almost verbatim. The
summary that appeared on ballots in November 2006 made no mention of embryos.
Nor did it note that the amendment's authors had rejected the common definition
of cloning — the creation of a cloned embryo — and redefined it as the
implantation of a cloned embryo in a uterus.

That redefinition defies logic. As bioethicist Wesley Smith has noted,
implanting a cloned embryo is no more an act of cloning than implanting an IVF
embryo is an act of fertilization. But Carnahan's complicity ensured that
voters reading only the ballot summary would be none the wiser to the word
games.

Armed with their preferred ballot language, support from Gov. Matt Blunt and
former Sen. John Danforth and a nearly $30 million war chest, the amendment's
backers eked out a 51 percent victory. Yet Missourians remained bitterly
divided after an election that many considered an unfair fight.

Last week, Carnahan had an opportunity to give Missourians another shot at an
honest debate about cloning. Instead, she gave voters more of the same.

Presented with an initiative that would close Amendment Two's loophole — by
defining cloning as the creation of a cloned embryo and thus outlawing cloning
for both research and reproduction — Carnahan wrote a ballot summary that bore
less resemblance to the initiative it summarized than to the press releases of
its big biotech critics.

She described the new initiative as an effort to "repeal" Missouri's cloning
ban and "criminalize" cures, even though the initiative includes no criminal
provisions and strengthens, not weakens, the existing ban.

Carnahan's misleading summary sparked outrage from the initiative's sponsoring
coalition, Cures Without Cloning, and drew renewed attention to her trail of
slanted summaries, which includes the loaded phrases she recently used to
describe an anti-affirmative action initiative that also is slated for the 2008
ballot.

Defenders say Carnahan's latest summary is justified because most people
understand cloning as the birth of a cloned baby, not the creation of a cloned
embryo. But a recent poll suggests widespread opposition to cloning for both research
and reproduction.

In a 2006 International Communications Research survey, 81 percent of
respondents said scientists should not be allowed to use cloning to create
embryos to be used and destroyed in research, roughly the same percentage that
disapproved of reproductive cloning. Pollsters find less opposition to cloning
when it is called SCNT or when it is described without reference to the human
embryos created and destroyed for research cloning.

That's no secret among Missouri's biotech barons or their powerful political
friends. Their continued attempts to conceal the true nature of the experiments
they support are a harsh reminder that, in the Show-Me state, it always pays to
read the fine print.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television host and St. Louis-based
fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is
www.colleen-campbell.com.