Strong concerns over the serious health risks discovered in animal cloning have
raised new moral and ethical questions about human cloning. Researchers at
the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center have consistently found that
cloned animals, and often mothers pregnant with the clones, die during gestation
or just weeks after birth due, in part, to a lack of needed DNA normally provided
by the male and female parents of offspring.
Gerald Schatten, head of the Oregon Regional Primate Research
Center's cloning lab recently admitted to "a hell of a lot of fetal and neonatal
deaths along the way."
When asked how the new research effects the moral and ethical
feasibility of human cloning, American Bio-Ethics Advisory Commission
Chairman Fr. Joseph Howard responded by saying, "Oregon researchers have
pointed out exactly what is at stake in the process of learning whether or not an
animal can be successfully cloned without the destruction of countless numbers
of clones."
Fr. Howard said this must give pause to those who argue in favor of cloning human
beings. "First and foremost," he said, "a human being deserves and has the right to expect
to be brought into the world through the process designed by nature, not by
man. Second, each and every human embryo is a human being, not a
disposable laboratory rat or monkey."
Causes of death in clones include placental abnormalities, abnormal
swelling, three to four times the normal rate of umbilical cord problems, and
severe immunological deficiencies. Schatten was quoted as saying, "You don't
have to know why cloned animals so often die of bizarre abnormalities to know
that the same thing would happen to people. Whatever is happening to these
animals is relevant to humans."
"Human beings are not material," said Fr. Howard. "They are not animals
and must not face the fate of those mammalian embryos currently dying for the
sake of the profiteering biotech industry."
