On 26 November, emergency legislation that explicitly makes reproductive cloning illegal in the UK will be introduced in the House of Lords. The Government has published the
text of the Bill, together with
explanatory notes. The legislation, if passed, would "prohibit the placing in a woman of a human embryo which has been created otherwise than by fertilisation". Critics complain that the legislation does not outlaw somatic cell nuclear replacement ("therapeutic cloning"), but to have included somatic cell nuclear replacement (SCNR) in the Bill would have run counter to Parliament's decision earlier this year to allow SCNR for the purpose of producing embryonic stem cells. The issue of whether the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority is empowered to issue licences for research involving somatic cell nuclear replacement (because such embryos are not produced by fertilisation) presumably still remains unresolved