Last night’s Senate vote on cloning human embryos will lead to the cloning and farming of human life to save the lives of people languishing on organ transplant waiting lists according to Queensland Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce.

While the Senate bill mandates that a cloned human life must be destroyed before 14 days, there are already many serious scientists and ethicists, such as Melbourne’s Professor Julian Savulescu, now an Oxford ethicist, who believe it is a “moral imperative” to clone foetuses and abort them to harvest their organs.

Senator Joyce said it is only a matter of time before emotional pressure is again put on politicians to again lower the ethical bar in search of potential cures.

“They will say if you believe that 14 days is OK, surely you cannot object to 28 days and it goes on,” Senator Joyce said.

“What this will lead to is developing a pre-born child to three months, taking it out of womb because it has a perfectly cloned liver, pancreas or cornea and using that to help someone with cancer, diabetes or blindness.

“Now that the Senate has said a cloned human life has ‘a lower moral status’ than a sperm and egg human life, then where does that difference in human rights stop? We can do what we like with a human life that has no rights. Even slaves in ancient times had rights – you couldn’t just kill them.

“This is the intellectually honest extrapolation of last night’s vote.

“Politicians have had a snow job put on them about potential miracles cures from stem cells taken from cloned embryos. Even if one agreed with the ethics of creating and destroying human life, scientists should be required to prove that the technology can deliver cures in animal models before asking for the right to do it in humans.

“This was the normal scientific approach.

“I hope the House of Representatives takes a closer look at the evidence and the potential consequences of redefining the status of human life before making its decision.”