Italian fertility specialist Severino Antinori has announced that he will begin human cloning in early 2002. Two hundred couples desperately seeking to create children will become human guinea pigs in a massive experiment. The odds are not in their favor. In animals, cloning currently only results in a successful pregnancy 3 to 5 percent of the time. And, even in those rare instances, many of the resulting offspring suffer. One-third die shortly before or right after birth. Other cloned animals seem perfectly healthy at first and then suffer heart and blood vessel problems, underdeveloped lungs, diabetes, immune system deficiencies and severe growth abnormalities.

If an infectious disease were killing one-third of human infants, we would declare it a public health emergency. We certainly wouldn’t set up a clinic to enable it to happen. Yet despite these grave risks, only five states have laws banning human cloning. There is no federal law on the subject yet. Despite widespread public opposition to human cloning, various researchers and biotech companies have so far prevented the passage of such a law.

This summer, however, a set of strange bedfellows emerged to shift the political dialogue about human cloning. A powerful new coalition has come forward in which traditional opponents—feminists and the Catholic Church, conservative Republicans and liberal, if not libertarian Democrats—have banded together to express concern about where the latest genetic and reproductive technologies are taking us. The result: the House of Representatives resoundingly passed a bill on July 31 banning human cloning and the creation of cloned human embryos for stem cell research. The next step is up to the Senate.

The hearing leading to that vote was one of the greatest occasions of political theater of our generation. Right next to pro-life advocate Richard Doerflinger of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops sat three witnesses whose testimony sent shock waves across the body politic. All three spoke in favor of a bill drafted by pro-life members of the House and Senate, and has been widely characterized as pro-life legislation. All three spoke against "therapeutic" cloning (the creation of cloned embryos to be the source of stem cells), which they argued should be outlawed. And yet all three were at pains to stress their pro-choice credentials.

Francis Fukuyama, eminent social philosopher and theorist and author of the unforgettable "End of History and the Last Man," began by saying that he was simply "agnostic" on the issue of abortion.

Stuart Newman of New York College of Medicine, on behalf of the respected Council for Responsible Genetics (the leading critical/environmental focus), set out CRG’s position as pro-choice on abortion but entirely opposed to the therapeutic research use of embryo cloning.

Most striking of all was testimony from Judy Norsigian of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (current editor of the benchmark feminist text Our Bodies, Ourselves). To describe her as pro-choice would be akin to describing the pope as Roman Catholic. Yet she, too, spoke, in her case vehemently, against all cloning.

One special moment of theater came during questioning when, in a conversation with Richard Doerflinger, she agreed that "the embryo is not nothing." Abortion-rights advocates argued that maternal rights trumped fetal rights; in this case there were no maternal rights. Another came in exchanges between Norsigian and Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), perhaps the member most consistently and intelligently critical of the anti- cloning law at the hearing. DeGette acknowledged to Norsigian that "your book is one of the most important in my life." Degette’s face was a study in cognitive dissonance.

Of course, there is theater and theater; sideshows and the main attraction. There have been odd couples before. Some of the most interesting stories now running have brought unlikely coalitions together (religious freedom is one example).

But what is happening around genetics and reproductive technologies is something more. The most challenging questions faced by our civilization in the 21st Century will lie just here, in the unfolding biotechnology agenda. Nothing will matter more for the future of the planet and, especially, its human inhabitants. And a curious consonance is emerging of pro-life "conservatives" and generally pro-choice progressives with anchorage in the environmental, feminist and disability communities.

Cloning has brought many of them together, pitted against the powerful biotech industry (which continues to campaign against regulation, with all the credibility of King Canute), technological fatalists and libertarians of right and left.

It remains to be seen whether the testimony trio of Norsigian, Newman and Fukuyama will set the debate between those who oppose abortion and those in favor of reproductive choice, which has hampered widespread societal discussion of important biotech issues, in the context of even wider concerns about human dignity and the human future.

But when history is written, we harbor no doubts that the cloning debate of 2001 will be noted as the start of something very big, in which those who oppose abortion and those favor reproductive rights discovered common ground in their commitment to the human future and the distrust of uncontrolled biotechnology, and revealed the extraordinary potential of their working together.