Protecting Human Life and Dignity: The Arguments against Human Cloning
The dangers associated with human cloning are extensive. Some of the objections to cloning are examined carefully in three papers: (1) Instruction on Respect for Human Life in its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation, (2) the testimony of Gilbert Meilaender, and (3) the testimony of Leon Kass. But at the outset, it may be useful to have a short list, just to give a hint of the variety of problems associated with cloning.
1. Assault on life
The first argument against human cloning is straightforward and widely shared: it is dangerous. The (single) report of a sheep cloned in Scotland involved 276 failures for one live adult sheep. If human cloning were attempted, how many children would die before one child lived?
2. Threat to health
The risks of genetic damage or mutation or unforeseen difficulties for the child are unknown, and may be unknowable without unethical experimentation.
3. Erosion of family life
In recent years, there has been a heightened awareness of the immense damage done to a child and to a society when fathers are missing from the home. In Washington, DC, homicide is a leading cause of death for young men; there are many factors that contribute to the pattern of violence, but fatherlessness is among them. Cloning brings children into the world with not one but two missing parents. Genetically, the parents of a cloned child are the parents of the cell donor; they may have been dead for 30 years. Further, the parents are missing or hard to identify not because of specific tragedies but as a matter of planning.
Further, with a cloned child, the basic human relationships need to be redefined. Is the cell donor your brother or your father? Is the cloned child a sister or a daughter?
4. Assault on the dignity of human procreation
Human procreation involves a man and a woman coming together as one, and having their shared love be fruitful, give new life. Assisted reproductive technologies are all challenges to human dignity, but completely artificial reproductive technology cloning leaves no trace of the dignity of human procreation.
5. Assault on the dignity of the conjugal union
Normally, a child is a living expression of the parent’s mutual love. To be sure, there are children whose parents do not love each other, and there are married couples who love each other and do not have children. Still, the existence of children is a persistent sign of the parents’ mutual love, and an invitation to ponder the endless mystery of gender differences. The potent and universal sign of hope is blurred or lost when the child’s life begins in a laboratory.
6. Disruptive of the unity of marriage and parenthood
Divorce, extramarital sex, contraception and IVF all disrupt the unity of marriage and parenthood, and these challenges are so common that many people despair of maintaining the ideal. Nonetheless, nearly all people are aware of the ideal, and cloning is yet another blow to it.
7. Commodification of persons
Cloning subjects a human being to treatment as a thing. Cloning a child is an expensive technological project, subject to quality control. Treating people as things is common, but is always destructive.
8. Manufacturing humans attacks the idea of equality
The gulf between an artisan and an artifact is immense. It is not necessarily unbridgeable; stories like My Fair Lady and Pinocchio explore this theme. But these stories are about a gulf, about inequality. By contrast, when Christian theologians were struggling to find the clearest way to say that Jesus was equal to the Creator, they said that he was “begotten, not made.”
9. Arrogance
If making people in your laboratory isn’t playing God, the phrase has no meaning.
10. Assault on individuality
One way to express the individuality of a person is to say that each person has a unique and unrepeatable genetic makeup. This description is dispensable; no one used the idea a century ago. But it is an efficient way to refer to individuality. A clone would still be unique, but less obviously so.
11. Control of human destiny
The decision to have a child often includes a courageous embrace of the future, although the future is unknown and unknowable, and is less controllable with each child. Cloning is a way to control the child/product, at least to some extent.
12. Eugenics
“More from the fit, less from the unfit.” The cutting edge of reproductive technology for the rich is IVF and perhaps cloning; for the poor, there is Depo-Provera. This social inequality may not be intrinsic to cloning, but should not be ignored either.
Cloning raises fears of a socially engineered society, like the world described in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. These fears should not be dismissed. Leaders throughout the field of bioethics are talking about a resurgence of eugenics (although they describe it as a new and benign eugenics).
In fact, the NBAC commissioned a paper on the ethics by Dan Brock, Ph.D., president of the American Association of Bioethics, who announced in the fall of 1996 that he is working on a book about the resurgence of a benign eugenics.