Every week, I am made more nervous by bioethicists. Every day, some new set of biotech horrors slithers across my desktop, tempting me to despair, go home to Nova Scotia, adopt an alias, live in the woods and pretend I don’t speak English.

In the last year, a group of suspiciously similar bills have been proposed in legislatures all over the U.S. and in Canada that would allow, with slight, gruesome variations, cloning of embryonic human beings, their implantation and gestation up to the ninth month and require a child be killed at birth.

In our offices, we first heard the term “clone and kill” bill in December 2002, in reference to legislation being considered in New Jersey. While claiming to be a bill to ban cloning, New Jersey Bill S-1909 would have allowed for the production of cloned human beings by a technique called Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer, ( SCNT, the “Dolly the Sheep” method) and their implantation and gestation up to the ninth month. It would have required that the child thus created be killed before birth. The legislation was stopped at the 11th hour, but the reptiles who promoted it are vowing to bring it back and are accusing the pro-lifers who exposed them of a campaign of disinformation. Had it passed, it would have allowed the creation of cloned human beings to be used as organ and tissue farms.

Creeped out yet? Don’t speak too soon.

In the April 7 edition of the Weekly Standard, an expert in bioethics wickedness, Wesley Smith, compared a Texas bill, SB 1034, to one carrying identical wording, S-1909. The Texas bill also claimed to ban cloning, called for the use of SCNT to produce cloned human beings, their implantation and gestation up to the ninth month and it required that the child thus created be killed before birth. Representatives of Texas Right to Life say this bill has no chance of passing and that a genuine ban on human cloning has been introduced and is expected to pass. Texas is known for its pro-life politicians, so there is hope that this will indeed be the case.

In New York state, the conference of Catholic bishops has released a statement denouncing a bill that would allow for the creation of cloned human beings, their gestation up to the ninth month and the killing of the child before birth. New York State Bill 6249A attempts to perpetuate the old, discredited hoax of the distinction between “reproductive” and “therapeutic” cloning by prohibiting the former but allowing the latter as a means to produce stem cells for disease therapy.

Kathleen Gahallager, of the New York Catholic bishops’ conference, told me that her office has been assured by members of the state senate that the bill will not get passed in that house. However, she also said that this bill was only a slightly less odious version of another that would have allowed the implantation of cloned human embryos and their gestation up to the ninth month, with the requirement that the child created be killed up to the end of the “newborn stage” – with this last term remaining undefined. Peter Singer and his bioethics minions have variously estimated the “newborn stage” as ending anywhere from 30 days to three months after birth.

Maryland House Bill 482 died in committee by unanimous vote, but the fact that it was presented, at more or less the same time, and again with identical wording to the Texas and New Jersey bills, makes a body pause.

California’s law on stem cell research, enacted last year, states that “research involving the derivation and use of human embryonic stem cells, human embryonic germ cells, and human adult stem cells from any source, including somatic cell nuclear transplantation, shall be permitted.” The California laws, already in place, contain wording that is, again, nearly identical to the Maryland, Texas, New Jersey and New York bills. This law, in conjunction with the law regarding human cloning, would allow – wait for it – the cloning of embryonic human beings, their implantation and gestation up to the ninth month and the requirement that the child be killed at birth.

Which brings us to the Canadian legislation.

Dr. Dianne Irving, an expert in bioethics (I won’t call her a bioethicist; she is a friend and a nice lady), sent us a warning after the failure of the New Jersey legislation that similar wording could be slipped into the bill at the last minute, thus rendering C-13 a “clone and kill” copycat. We stayed alert, but nothing of the kind happened – until Irving sent us a note reminding us that the law in Canada says that a “human being” does not exist until birth. Under the Criminal Code of Canada, an embryo, fetus, or baby is not a “human being” until he emerges completely from the womb. Nothing new had to be snuck in. We already have it.

The prohibitions in C-13 include, in many cases, the condition that an activity is only prohibited “for the purpose of creating a human being,” which in Canada, means allowing the child to come to birth. If the intention is to create an embryo for research, and the child so created is killed before birth, then cloning, implantation and gestation up to the ninth month would be allowed. Clone and kill.

That the bills in the U.S. are mostly failing, and C-13 is likely to pass without significant change, is a testament to Canadian expertise in the art of newspeak. C-13, a mass of contradictions, inaccuracies, errors, omissions and outright lies, is a monument to the utilitarian, brave new Canadian values as they are understood in Parliament, the abortion mills, and the bioethicists’ hive-minds.