The Food and Drug Administration is, once again, flirting with inflicting meat and milk from cloned animals on the consuming public despite the fact that almost two-thirds of Americans oppose the technology and don’t want to eat cloned milk and meat. By not requiring that cloned milk and meat be labeled, the U.S. Government is permitting these ethically questionable products to be foisted on a reluctant public through secrecy and stealth. There will be no freedom to choose in the cloned milk and meat marketplace.

Independent polls taken over several years, including one by the Gallup organization and the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology show over 60 percent of Americans oppose animal cloning and would not purchase cloned meat and milk even if the government says they are safe.

Three times in the last four years the FDA has stated it has evidence that the cloned milk and meat are safe and will soon be on the market. The FDA has, however, never made its full risk assessment or scientific studies available to the public nor provided an opportunity to comment.

Claims that cloning is safe for animals are questionable.  Clone pregnancies, even those in the studies FDA cites to support cloning, often end in miscarriage and many of the animals are deformed or do not survive to maturity.  FDA has acknowledged that there are more negative outcomes of pregnancy than in other forms of assisted reproduction but says they are similar in nature to problems that arise in non-cloned animals.  In other words, it is okay to increase the number of animals that suffer as long as they don’t suffer in new ways.

A flood of milk from highly productive cloned cows is not good for the taxpayers.  Americans have a milk surplus that has cost taxpayers over $5 billion in the last five years.  Surplus milk is turned into high fat products that then go to school children adding fat and cholesterol to their diets.

There is, in short, no public value from a technology that raises serious concerns regarding cruelty to animals and the nasty underlying threat that this is the first step down the slippery slope to human cloning.