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 human cloning. Section 2(4) of the Initiative states that "No person may, for valuable consideration, purchase or sell human blastocysts or eggs for stem cell research."
But wait... the definition section of the amendment, Section 6, reverses the plain English meaning of the apparent ban on cloning in Section 2(4). We will see this pattern of reversals again and again as we go through the amendment.
The definition in Section 6(17) states that "'Valuable consideration'...does not include reimbursement for reasonable costs incurred in connection with the removal, processing, disposal, preservation, quality control, storage, transfer, or donation of human eggs, sperm, or blastocysts, including lost wages of the donor... [and] also does not include the consideration paid to a donor of human eggs or sperm by a fertilization clinic or sperm bank."
In other words, fertilization clinics can pay women whatever they want for human eggs, and then the cloners can reimburse the clinics to obtain the eggs. The cloners will get the money to do this from the taxpayers, as we will see later in this series.
Amendment 2 thus pretends to ban paying women for eggs but actually creates a constitutional right for cloners to pay women for their eggs using fertilization clinics as middlemen.
Egg donation is dangerous—side effects include nausea in mild cases and liver and kidney damage leading to hospitalization in severe cases. And the cloners will need LOTS of fresh eggs. In their failed attempts clone a human being, cloners in South Korea used at least 2221 eggs from 119 women. The demand for eggs threatens to lead cloners to lure vulnerable women to risk their health for the promise of exorbitant payments for their eggs, all at taxpayer expense.