In the wake of the news about the potentially first human clone, I can’t help but noticing that all the arguments against human cloning invoke god/creator/bible/etc. It’s not what god wants. It’s an abomination unto the lord. It’s an insult to god. It’s “not moral.” Why? “Because god says so.”
**Are there any reasonable arguments against human cloning that do not invoke spiritual/theological principles? **
Now, if you’re one of those “morality comes from god” people then I already know what your answer is, and this thread simply (no flame intented) is not directed towards you. I don’t want this to turn into a “where do morals come from?” thread (we can do that somewhere else if you like).
I’m assuming that cloned humans will have all the rights that non-cloned humans have. In other words, I’m assuming they won’t be kept in cages to be used for harvesting organs, etc. That may be a “fear” but I simply don’t see it as being a reasonable one.
I imagine that if cloning ever becomes the dominant form of reproduction, that tinkering with DNA will be rather commonplace. Natural evolution takes too damn long anyways. I want a massive forehead NOW!!!
Well, for one, there are enough damn people allready! We can barely feed all the ones we have, much less five or six “spares”.
If you are talking about genetic engineering, that’s a diferent story. The pros are that we can wipe out genetic disorders. The cons are that if only wealthy people can afford to have custom made babies, it might create a class society (like Gattaca) where the children of the wealthy get ahead more easily because they are born smarter, stronger, better looking, or what have you.
I’m not so much worried about the gene pool being diluted. It’s not like everyone will pick kids that look alike any more than they wear the same color shirts.
Spiritus Mundi
“Only if it became widespread to the exclusion (or at least significant decline) of sexual procreation. I hardly think that is likely to happen.”
The goal of science should be to create more ways to have sex. Not less.
Now I have to go finish watching the end of Blade Runner.
Cloning, in general, may be ethically neutral once it has been perfected. I have not seen or heard anyone interviewed in the last couple of days who have argued against cloning as an absolute. The interviews I’ve encountered have universally condemned the Raël announcement on the grounds that, based on what we know of cloning in all other large mammals, the offspring is sure to suffer disabilities. The arguments put forth were that it was abhorrent to inflict a lifetime disability on a child, simply to get one’s name in the paper for being “first” without taking the time to set reasonable safeguards on the experiment.
think of what the life of a clone would be like. everyone would know he was a clone. he would be the object of a hell of a lot of hatred, with so many organizations opposing the process by which he came about.
also, he would be a copy. he wouldn’t be the original. i can see how that might allow persecution, or subjugation, as though he were somehow less human.
why create a life destined to be so terribly difficult? it’s like people who can’t afford to feed themselves having children.
We seem to be confining the discussion here to reproductive cloning. My problem with reproductive cloning is that it reinforces the idea that people have the right to become parents at any cost.
We’ve come a very long way in terms of community attitudes since the first IVF babies were regarded as “freaks”, yet IVF still has a very high failure rate. Cloning is a much more complex technology, and one in which the risk of congenital defects is currently extremely high. While the Raelians have not explicitly stated why 5 of the 10 pregnancies they created were terminated, it isn’t outside the realms of possibility that even at the embyonic stage of development it was apparent those pregnancies were not going to produce viable babies.
I find the concept of people seeking to recreate a deceased child more than a little creepy, and at least two of the Raelian pregnancies to date have been attempts to create a clone of a now deceased child.
I’m far more comfortable with the idea of creating clones which are destined for destruction and from which embryonic stem-cells will be harvested that I am about the use of the technology for reproductive purposes.
I don’t think you’ve been looking in the right places, then. President Bush calls for a ban on all human cloning, saying “Life is a creation, not a commodity” and citing concerns about “a society in which human beings are grown for spare body parts, and children are engineered to custom specifications”; Senator Frist, the new majority leader, mainly discusses “therapeutic” or “research cloning” (the creation of cloned embryos for medical research or as a source of stem cells for medical treatments, with the expectation the cloned embryos will never be allowed to develop into full-term babies), while pretty offhandedly saying that “Most agree that human reproductive cloning, or the cloning of human beings, should be banned”–echoing very similar words by President Bush. In fact, most public debate seems to be simply assuming that reproductive cloning ought to be banned, with disagreement focusing on whether or not research into potential cloning-based medical therapies ought also to be prohibited. My impression is that Democratic Party leaders are, at best, accepting that reproductive cloning should “of course” be banned, but are trying to keep the door open for other sorts of medical research involving cloning. Again, the objections to reproductive cloning don’t seem to be pragmatic–that the technology just isn’t there yet to do it safely–but moral, that there’s just something fundamentally wrong about “copying” people.
Mind you, I don’t agree with where the popular debate seems to be; many arguments against cloning do seem to be either at least quasi-religious or else based on a lot of bad sci-fi type misapprehensions about what cloning is; i.e., notions of people being “copied”, visions of armies of cloned Hitlers, and the President of the United States expressing fears about babies being grown for spare parts (as if we would not be capable of recognizing clones as humans).
I agree that cloning probably ought to be banned now, on the grounds that you say: it’s a medical technology which is not yet ready to be used on human beings. When or if it has been proven safe (to the same extent that, say, in vitro fertilization or fertility drugs have been proven safe), I don’t think it should be outlawed. Personally, I don’t think I would see the attraction of cloning in most scenarios, but my or anyone else’s lack of desire to do something does not justify putting people in prison. The nightmarish scenarios President Bush talks about can be avoided by making it clear from the start that clones are human babies from birth (or decantation, if it ever comes to that), with all the rights thereof; and that if mistreated they will be taken from their parents or legal guardians and those parents or legal guardians may face criminal prosecution, the same as for any other human baby. (Some legal clarification would probably be in order as to exactly who is the “parent” of a clone–presumably the DNA “donor” in most cases.)
How? Would a big scarlet “C” be tattooed on the foreheads of all clones?
Well…we don’t require any license to have a child the old-fashioned way. If cloning is made effective, I can’t see putting people in prison for having cloned babies, unless we also generally put people in prison for “having babies without a license” or something like that, which I don’t think I want to see (tempting though it may be sometimes).
I think lots of people have children for what I consider bad or even vaguely creepy reasons. Unless they actually mistreat their children, though, we don’t lock them up for it.
I’m not suggesting that people seeking to use the technology for reproductive purposes should be locked up. Whether now or in twenty years time, we will eventually perfect this technology ( or at least reduce the risks to an “acceptable” level). Now is the time to consider the ways in which its use should be regulated (or not).
I don’t think banning the use of the technology for reproductive purposes is a long-term option. It’s an extremely expensive procedure and those who can afford to utilise it can certainly afford to travel overseas to do so. If we regulate its use, however, we create a body of scientific information to which we will not have access if we force the procedure underground. We won’t know for at least a generation whether human clones develop normally to adulthood and in turn produce normal offspring; we can only glean that information through following the progress of human clones throughout their life.
Well, I would agree with a legally-enforced moratorium on human cloning until it’s shown that it won’t produce children and adults with serious health problems. Given the complexity of the subject that would probably be a pretty lengthy moratorium–years, maybe decades, I don’t know. I guess the moratorium would eventually give way to strictly regulated human cloning experiments after we get to the point where we have some confidence in the safety of the procedure, but still need to confirm that it actually works. But I do have a problem with a ban which is based in principle on the idea that reproductive cloning is just “wrong” somehow (or violates “the laws of nature and/or God”).
The same people who are in a tizzy over cloning are the same ones who thought “test tube babies” would be the downfall of humanity. Granted, cloning is harder to do than in vitro fertilization, but did people make the argument that “it’s not safe for the babies now, so we must ban it until it is safe for the babies” argument back when in vitro fertilization was first introduced?
That being said, I have yet to see any hard evidence that shows cloned human children will be born with birth defects. The only “evidence” I’ve seen is that sometimes it takes a few hundred embryos to get one that’s viable, thus pissing off religious people because “an embryo is a life” (back to abortion). Once a viable clone baby is born, however, I have seen no evidence that it will have birth defects. Any “well we messed around with it so it will probably have birth defects” argument is just speculation, nothing more.
There has been some indications that Dolly, the famous cloned sheep, is showing various signs of premature aging. Some of these are on the genetic level–abnormalities in the “telomeres” at the tips of her chromosomes–and we don’t know exactly what that will mean in terms of her health, but she has also developed arthritis–again, I don’t think it’s known if this is related to her being a clone or not. Other cloning experiments have also found problems, although I think that at least some cloning experiments have not seen problems–at least, not so far. See the article Extensive new study shows abnormalities in cloned animals from MIT for a pessimistic view.
As you say, it’s a lot more complex than in vitro fertilization. If cloning of mammals is ever perfected, it’s going to take a while. I don’t think we should rush in to this.
IVF really wasn’t anything Nature hadn’t done on its own. Once ways of storing eggs, sperm, and embryos without damaging them were worked out, the underlying process had already been perfected through millions of years of evolution.
Cloning is inherently “unnatural”: it’s utterly different from the mechanism that produces identical multiples.
The various methods used to generate clones somehow reactivate genes that have been shut off in most adult cells. We can reasonably deduce that any process that’s capable of turning on dormant genes can awaken those that are meant to be silenced (deactivated viruses and so forth). That alone is a significant risk, and it may partly explain the high mortality/morbidity rates associated so far with cloning.
well, dolly was just a sheep. we’ll know who she was for a long time to come.
granted, dolly was the first complex organism, and you might say once cloning becomes commonplace, it might be harder to tell.
but what of people bred for spare body parts? or, what of the perception that they may have been? i don’t need to strain my future-eyes too hard to see a time when clones are yet another victim of discrimination.
“hey, did you hear that kid that moved in downstairs is a clone? what a freak!”
