Jefferson City, MO (LifeNews.com) -- Missouri pro-life advocates say they will bring back their efforts to ban human cloning in 2010 after failing to get a measure on the ballot for November. Cloning opponents want to close the loophole in the Amendment 2 proposal Missouri voters narrowly approved in 2006.

The loophole allows somatic cell nuclear transfer, a type of human cloning practice used by scientists to create and kill human beings for research purposes.

Missouri Right to Life and others brought a proposal for a ballot initiative that would have fixed the problem but Secretary of State Robin Carnahan successfully prevented them from doing so.

She issued ballot summary language that the Missouri Court of Appeals ruled was “insufficient and unfair" but it took so long for the process to get to a court ruling that it made it so pro-life advocates didn't have time to get the signatures necessary to qualify the measure for the ballot.

Pam Fichter, president of Missouri Right to Life, told a local pro-life meeting in Springfield Tuesday night that the cloning ban will make a comeback in 2010.

"We're on the winning side," Fichter said, according to a News-Leader report. "We just aren't in charge of the timetable."

MRL will re-file the language after this year's election in order to get a head start on the process, Fichter said.

"We now have some better predictions of how courts are going to rule," Fichter added.

"Science is on our side," Fichter said. "Pro-life people are patient and we're not going away."

Amendment 2, backed by a narrow 50-49 margin, was supposed to prohibit human cloning and allow embryonic stem cell research, but a loophole in the language opened the door for scientists to clone human beings for the sole purpose of killing them.

The ballot proposal would not overturn the amendment but it seeks to close the pro-cloning loophole found in it.

Related web sites:
Missouri Right to Life - http://www.missourilife.org