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An amendment to the bankruptcy bill before the Senate would have prevented pro-life demonstrators from declaring bankruptcy to protect their assets from court fines or judgments. But Republicans defeated the amendment by Senator Chuck Schumer, of New York, in what is being called the first abortion showdown of the new Senate.

The vote to remove the amendment from the bill passed 53-46, and now the bankruptcy bill, which would make it more difficult for consumers to declare bankruptcy, has passed its final hurdle before the Senate will vote on the entire bill.

Schumer said the amendment "goes right to the heart of what America is all about. It says those who use violence to achieve their political goals cannot get a benefit, in this case bankruptcy."

Pro-life groups saw the bill as a specific attack on abortion protestors, not just violent ones. The amendment "unjustly targets peaceful pro-life demonstrators and treats them as violent criminals. This is blatant bigotry against free speech and pro-life activism," said Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council.

Some may wonder why peaceful pro-life demonstrators need to worry about court fines or judgments, but it happened to Randy Alcorn for blocking the doors to an abortion clinic. But there seems to be some confusion about what violence Schumer is talking about. Surely, there are laws prohibiting anyone from bombing, or otherwise committing violence against, any kind of building.

"This vote was a loss for abortion rights advocates, in the first test of their strength in the new Senate, which has four more Republican members than the last one," reports Reuters. "For supporters of abortion rights, 'it'll be uphill sledding, that's for sure' in this Congress, said California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein after the vote."

U.N. backs U.S. plea for total ban on human cloning
The U.N. General Assembly, made up of all member nations, voted 84 to 34, with 37 abstentions "to ban all human cloning, including the cloning of human embryos for stem-cell research," according to Reuters. But the declaration only encourages nations to ban cloning. It isn't a treaty that requires it.

It seems that most disagreement was over "therapeutic" cloning, or cloning embryos in order to harvest stem cells. The U.S. voted for the ban, but an effort to pass a binding treating banning all forms of human cloning failed.

"The British delegate, who voted against [the declaration], said the Assembly had missed an opportunity to adopt a convention prohibiting reproductive cloning because of the intransigence of those who failed to recognize that other sovereign States might want to permit strictly controlled applications of therapeutic cloning," according to a U.N. report.

Most countries that are already working on "therapeutic" cloning voted against the declaration, saying they support a ban on reproductive cloning. "From the beginning, the debate hinged on whether to outlaw all cloning or permit cloning for research," writes the Associated Press. "Nations that sought a total ban always had more votes, but never enough to achieve broad consensus or a binding worldwide treaty."

Life ethics:

• Senate leader targeted for supporting stem cell bill | Catholic group protests outside E. Boston house (The Boston Globe)
• Conservatives draft a 'bioethics agenda' for president | Frustrated by Congress's failure to ban human cloning or place even modest limits on human embryo research, a group of influential conservatives have drafted a broad "bioethics agenda" for President Bush's second term and have begun the delicate task of building a political coalition to support it (The Washington Post)

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March (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49