MOH's Response To Clonaid's Claim On Cloning Babies

22 Jun 2004

An article published in Streats on 18 June 2004 reported that two Singaporean couples had signed an agreement with a foreign company, Clonaid, to try for babies through cloning after previous unsuccessful attempts to conceive through in-vitro fertilisation. The Ministry of Health (MOH) would like to caution the public that the claims made by Clonaid have not been verified by any reputable authorities nor substantiated with any scientific evidence.

MOH will shortly be introducing a Bill into Parliament to prohibit human reproductive cloning. Under this Bill, anyone found guilty of placing a human embryo clone into the body of a woman will be liable for a maximum fine of $100,000, a maximum jail term of 10 years or both. The draft Bill was put up for public consultation in May 2004 and is expected to come into effect later this year. In the meantime, the recommendation of the Bioethics Advisory Committee for a ban on all human reproductive cloning activity has been widely publicized and circulated to the general public and the medical/scientific community. MOH is confident that Singapore doctors and researchers will not participate in such unethical activities.

Reproductive cloning activities carried out in other countries would be subject to the prevailing laws in those countries. Many developed countries such as the UK, Australia, Canada, France, Japan and Israel have already passed legislation banning human reproductive cloning. The USA has also banned the use of federal funds for carrying out human reproductive cloning research.