QUEENSLAND Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce has appealed to his Lower House colleagues to back an amendment to the controversial cloning bill.

The amendment, to be moved by Member for Bass Michael Ferguson and seconded by former Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson, seeks to remove a provision in the bill allowing eggs to be harvested from late term aborted baby girls.

Human embryo cloning requires thousands of human eggs.

"We must be ever vigilant that we do not become barbaric and cloud our barbarism with some perverse sense of sanitising the truth. The harvesting of ovarian tissue from 22-33 week old aborted girls is nothing short of disgusting.

"I urge strongly that the Lower House pass the amendment to stop this and at least leave this Parliament with some sense that we have not devolved to a complete nihilist position on human life.

"Just say this to yourself. We have to abort a baby in tact and then, quickly whilst the baby is fresh, remove its ovaries so that we can conduct experiments.

"What sort of world is it that we are now living in? I urge the Lower House to do the decent thing by all of us and pass an amendment on this barbaric provision of the bill."

In his speech to Parliament today, Mr Ferguson referred to research on this technique as described by Israeli scientists in 2003:

"They took a slice of ovarian tissue from each of seven aborted baby girls and conducted successful experiments in maturing eggs from this tissue. The baby girls had been aborted between 22 weeks and 33 weeks. It is generally anticipated that eggs could only be derived from baby girls aborted late term in pregnancy. The method of abortion would also have to result in the foetal body being delivered intact and as near to alive as possible in order to harvest the ovarian tissue while it was still fresh."