By Nicholas Regush

What a week for cloning! I almost wrote "clowning." We get news of a possible cloning pregnancy. Then we get news that two colleagues -- Severino Antinori of Rome and Panos Zavos of the U.S.-based Andrology Institute - who have been hopeful about producing a human clone - are splitsville. So says Zavos. Severino isn,t talking. Each is on his merry own way to get the human cloning job done sometime this year. That is, if you believe in the Tooth Fairy.

First guys, if monkeys (very genetically similar to humans) have yet to be cloned (the embryos are a horror show), then you can understand why some people, me included, suspect you both may be sipping on some peculiar plant extract. Never mind that most people think you are nuts (scientifically-speaking, of course) to even want to try to do this.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, or more specifically, President George Bush spoke today about the need for an outright ban on cloning. Now, this is controversial territory because while it appears mostly everyone (who is not sipping on some peculiar plant extract) is opposed to cloning high-tech that would produce a baby, many, however, think that the use of technology to create embryos that would serve as sources of embryonic stem cells, is an idea whose time has come.

There has been a lot of hoopla lately about how these stem cells could be fiddled with to grow into tissue that might save lives. In other words, not doing baby cloning is pretty well agreed-upon (except by those who sip a peculiar plant extract), but there are two camps when it comes to so-called "therapeutic cloning." George Bush, for instance, doesn,t want Congress to pass a bill that would allow for any sort of cloning experimentation with embryos. Many scientists say this religious-tainted attitude is nothing less that a proposed death sentence for many people who might greatly benefit from the potential results of stem-cell research. Well, maybe and maybe not. This is still an incredibly speculative area in medicine with a lot of biotech hype raining down on all of us.

But there is something missing in this entire debate about cloning. And it is shameful that it has not become a major issue. It has to do with the overall process of generating embryos. And, as one might expect in these less-than-civilized times, it is women AGAIN that are being used as guinea pigs to service the visionaries.

Here's the bottom line that no one is talking about: women are being given powerful fertility drugs (Lupron, in particular, which has numerous serious side-effects and has never been approved by the FDA for fertility treatment), to superovulate so that multiple eggs and embryos can be produced. Those so-called "left-over" embryos that have been created and have gone to stem-cell research labs have been products of an unregulated fertility industry that has managed to escape the radar of Congress. Where has the oversight been for those women who undergo in vitro fertilization? What about their short-term and long-term risk for serious health problems?

Does anyone in Congress give a damn? Apparently not.