The Ballot Summary of the cloners' Amendment 2 that you will read in the voting booth on November 7
completely misrepresents the full 2000-word text of the amendment.
To correct this injustice, Missouri Roundtable For Life is publishing this weekly series
on the principal deceptions of Amendment 2.
Amendment 2 pretends to ban the creation of human embryos for research. Section 2(2) of the Initiative states that "No human blastocyst may be produced by fertilization solely for the purpose of stem cell research."
This language gives researchers an opening to obtain as many fresh human embryos as they want from in vitro fertilization clinics. Such clinics are specifically allowed to create "any number of human blastocysts." Even if these embryos are created "for the purpose of treating human infertility," they will not all be implanted in a uterus. Those that are not implanted can be handed over to researchers to do as they please—indeed Section 6(13) specifically lists embryonic stem cells “derived from in vitro fertilization blastocysts” as included in the definition of stem cells.
We saw last week that researchers can reimburse fertilization clinics for the "costs incurred in connection with the removal, processing, disposal, preservation, quality control, storage, transfer, or donation of human eggs, sperm, or blastocysts." And of course, the researchers will get the money to do this from the taxpayers, as we will see later in this series.
Amendment 2 thus pretends to ban creating human embryos for research purposes but actually creates a perverse constitutional incentive for in vitro fertilization clinics to create even more human embryos than usual so they can be manipulated and destroyed in laboratories.