On Good Morning America this morning, the following was mentioned: (quoted from the GMA website)
Why is this?
That’s interesting and weird. I have no clue except to specualte that it might have to do with the parentage. In the clone case there is no father (unless you consider the mother’s father the father…shudder).
Beyond that you have a human being born to a woman in the usual fashion. That it’s a clone only speaks to its genetic makeup. It’s still an individual and once here deserving of all the legal protections and status as any other infant/person.
That’s my best guess too, that the parentage is the situation here. Whoever bore the developing fetus would be a “surrogate mother”, and genetically the clone would be closest to an identical twin of the donor. I would have hoped they’d provide some more information than just throwing out that statement.
(Disclaimer: IANAL, etc.)
Well, that’s what will show up as positive in a blood test, which is what our current body of laws is using…
It will also be quite creepy if the clone ends up having the same fingerprints.
I guess so. I know there is nothing ‘wrong’ here in so far as incest is concerned. It’s just weird seeming. So is the ‘father’ properly ‘Grandpa’, ‘Dad’ or both?
We have five parties here.
(a) Donor, the person who donates the cell which is cloned. Note that Donor may be unwilling or (at least hypothetically) unaware of the fact that her cell has been cloned.
(b) Donor’s father.
© Donor’s mother.
(d) Surrogate, the woman who bears the clone. She may be the same person as Donor, but does not need to be. Let us assume that she, at least, must be a knowing and willing participant in the process
(e) Clone.
Genetically, Clone is the child of Donor’s mother and Donor’s father, and is something like an identical twin to Donor.
From a legal point of view, while the answer may vary from place to place, I somehow doubt that parental obligations can be imposed on Donor’s father and Donor’s mother purely on account of the genetic relationship. If that is the effect of the law, the law will probably be changed if cloning becomes common.
It would seem to follow that they should not have parental rights either. The position might be different if they actively seek parental rights and obligations, especially if no-one else is willing or able to take on the parental role. But cases like that should perhaps be dealt with through some variation on existing adoption procedures.
Common sense suggests that Donor should have parental obligations, but presumably not in cases where she is an unwilling or unaware participant in the process. On the other hand a rape victim who conceives and bears a child has parental obligations. This has nothing to do with the fact that she might theoretically have chosen to terminate the pregnancy and has therefore at some level chosen to bear the child; this was so even when termination was not available. If rape victims can have parental obligations to children born of forced sexual intercourse, can Donor’s have parental obligations to children born of forced cloning?
Surrogate, at least, is in a position which is not unique to clones, and already arises, so local law may already define her obligations and rights. Obviously there is a strong case for saying that Surrogate should have obligations to the child which she has born.
I may be very confused by this whole mess, but if I recall reading correctly, the genetic material from the egg (I assume from the woman who wound up bearing the child) was removed, replaced with DNA from the woman’s skin cell, and then electrified into splitting (I believe the phrase used was “tricking it into thinking it was fertilized”). So it is my understanding that this was done w/o sperm, so there is no father. Is this right? But the mother would still be the mother in every other sense. Why does only CA recognize this, and the other 49 states require the baby to be put up for adoption? Can the mother then adopt her own baby?
BTW, I think this whole thing is a big hoax that is in it’s last days, but I’m just curious about the whole “adortion thing”.
Thanks for your posts so far, and please pardon my ignorance if I am missing the answer.
Interesting thread…
A minor bit of information regarding clones.
Idintical twins are essentially clones in the biological sense, as they arise from the splitting of the developing ball of cells that normally produces one child. So both identical twins have exactly the same genes, and exactly the same father and mother. Differences in identical twins are thought to be due to slight differences in environment, the turning on of one gene in one twin and not the other (yes, this happens!).
Biologically speaking, essentially the mother of the cloned child is the mother of the woman who cloned herself, and the father is the father of the woman who cloned herself.
IF this is a true clone, we should expect that it would bear about as much resemblence to its mother as most identical twins bear to each other. Some are very close, and some not so close.
Regarding fingerprints being identical in identical twins: The fingerprints of identical twins are not identical. They will however bear the same general pattern (whorls, loop, and so forth)
The fingerprint pattern is one of those traits that actually are influenced by the developmental process and chance interacting…and are the results of structures called papillae that develop in the dermis of the skin. You have these all over your body, but only in the surfaces of the hands and feet do they line up to form the ridges of the prints.
Our laws simply are not adequate to address the many moral and ethical problems this clone presents, so I would expect to see a lot of discussion regarding the matter.
Personal opinions: Probably not a true clone. If it is a true clone, there may be a number of developmental problems with the child. One wonders how many unsuccessful clones might have been produced by the persons involved?