Against Human Cloning

...There is no middle ground here, not merely because the principles involved do not admit it, but because the actual practice grants no room for compromise...

...A vague belief in the capacity of human beings to obtain any end through beneficent science has oddly joined a vague belief in the incapacity of human beings to halt the march of science or decide what those ends should be...

...But even the federal directives for biological research, which do not admit the personhood of embryos, nonetheless demand that they be treated with "profound respect...

...Recent events in England are instructive...

...It is a feeling, a sentiment, masquerading as an argument— and perhaps the most insidious of them all...

...But a ban solely on reproductive uses only looks like a compromise...

...On April 19, health secretary Alan Milburn announced, to great fanfare in the British press, that Britain would shortly become the first country in the world to ban human cloning...

...But all he really meant was that Britain would prohibit reproduction by cloning, while continuing to promote the actual practice of cloning by encouraging laboratories to perfect their techniques...

...To allow human cloning for medical and biological research is necessarily to allow—in the very near future—cloning for the reproduction of human beings...

...For those who are pro-life, of course, the embryo and the fetus are already members of the human race, and it is wrong simply to destroy them...

...American politics being what it is, there will be an attempt to find a "compromise" on this issue, as there was when Congress last considered it in 1998...

...Indeed, the debate over cloning shouldn't be forced back into the well-worn grooves of the abortion debate...

...There is no middle ground here, not merely because the principles involved do not admit it, but because the actual practice grants no room for compromise...

...The point is to express a feeling: Death ought not to sting, the grave should not have the victory, the ones we love must come back to life...

...Who could be opposed to experiments that might lead to a cure for cancer, a fully compatible liver for transplanting, a genetically engineered solution to diabetes...

...And take, for a final example, the claim that a law against cloning human beings will make us forfeit potential advances in medicine...

...It was as polished an example of studied disingenuousness and blatant obfuscation as one will ever see...

...Then, too, there is the problem of the status of the embryos created by cloning...

...Of course, once it has been implanted, a law against reproductive cloning would clearly have been violated...

...For America, the lesson is clear: The only way to stop human reproductive cloning is to ban all human cloning, and to ban it now...

...But, then, this was never meant to be a genuine argument...

...The favored form of compromise prohibits "reproductive" cloning while allowing "therapeutic" cloning to continue unabated...

...Many supporters of cloning actually make the same argument, although they run it in reverse to frighten off liberal Democrats: A ban on cloning, they warn, would mean the loss of "a woman's right to choose...

...And the arguments against it are . . . well, as it turns out, there really aren't many arguments against a ban on manufacturing human beings like gingerbread men from a cookie cutter...

...But the point of invoking those grieving parents is not to present an argument...

...And so cloning enthusiasts look to science—as to a god—to wipe away our tears, to assuage the eternal pity, and to console human grief...

...Part of the problem is the question of intention...

...The issue of cloning offers the possibility of some interesting realignments in American politics...

...life: The unfettered right to abortion grants us a Promethean power of life and death over our unborn offspring that naturally leads to practices like cloning...

...Since all embryonic clones are made in the same way, we cannot know the reason for which an embryo was created until it is either destroyed in research or implanted in a womb...

...Four days later, the head of Britain's embryology authority quietly announced that scientists who had gone abroad to do embryo research illegal in Britain could return to "continuing acclaim...

...Yet halt it we can, and should—for reasons com-pellingly presented by such thinkers as Leon Kass and Gilbert Meilaender...

...Bottum, for the Editors...

...And a law banning only reproductive cloning would produce, for the first time in federal statutes, a class of embryos it is a crime not to destroy, a class of embryos that must not be treated with profound respect...

...Those reasons range from the extraordinarily high incidence of deformity among cloned animals, to the familial confusion that will be engendered by reproducing oneself as one's own child, to the likely psychological damage to the person created by cloning, and, most fundamentally, to the fact that moving from the begetting of our children to the manufacture of our descendants is a radical and perhaps irreparable dehu-manization...

...Our fellow pro-lifers may well be right that there is an underlying logic linking these issues...

...But examined more closely, the hoped-for medical advances turn out to be merely examples of things that researchers promise they will try to find, if only we leave them alone to play with human cloning as much as they like...

...For what this "compromise" would mean is a license to practice all the cloning a scientist may desire, while vainly attempting to prevent the end toward which that practice clearly aims: the live birth of cloned human beings...

...But the truth is—and this is the vital political point—we can ban cloning without touching Roe v. Wade...

...Some antiabortion activists do make this argument...

...It is meant instead to express a feel-ing—a feeling that radical individualism, sexual liberation, and modern science have all somehow combined to bring us to this point, and to reject any piece of it now, even the reproduction of human beings by cloning, is to return to the Dark Ages...

...They say everything bad begins with a disrespect for human The only way to stop human reproductive cloning is to ban all human cloning...

...But under scrutiny, these ostensible arguments quickly dissolve into a fog of vague, unfocused feelings about science, sex, and the human condition...

...But there is at that point no possible redress, short of forced abortions or a federal pregnancy police determining how each pregnancy in America came about...

...But, then, the promise of unlimited medical advance was never really an argument for keeping cloning legal...

...Or take, for another example, the claim that a ban on human cloning would be a blow against Roe v. Wade...

...As well oppose the rising of tomorrow's sun, we are counseled, as try to halt the arrival of human cloning...

...America can thus guarantee the full abortion license only by allowing cloning to proceed unhindered...

...It has survived unscathed, for that matter, the disastrous initial results of stem-cell treatment (in which the cells, derived from embryos, went wild and began producing not merely brain tissue but other tissue as well when introduced into the brains of some of their new hosts...

...It's true, of course, that some propositions resembling arguments for cloning have been advanced in recent years...

...This is an issue, after all, on which radical environmentalists and religious evangelicals find themselves in agreement—which would be impossible if the right-to-choose equals right-to-clone argument were definitive...

...And the use of these putative therapeutic miracles in pro-cloning arguments seems to have survived unscathed the recent evidence that it is possible to obtain the required stem cells not from embryos but from adults' blood, bone marrow, brain tissue, and even fat cells...

...Thus, the argument goes, we can succeed in banning cloning only by winning—today—the battle over abortion...

...Once we add in the thousands of university laboratories anxious for the acclaim of scientific breakthroughs and the dozens of large pharmaceutical companies hungry for new technologies, the use of cloning simply feels like the future: unavoidable, inexorable, and predetermined...

...It's actually a victory for the pro-cloning forces—and everyone opposed to the onslaught of human cloning must reject it out of hand...

...You don't have to delve very far into philosophical questions of identity and existence to realize that the notion is so confused and self-contradictory, it won't even bear the weight of its own expression...

...The manipulation of stem cells obtained from cloned embryos is asserted to be necessary for the desired medical breakthroughs...

...Take, for example, the claim that to prohibit cloning would be to prevent a grief-stricken mother and father from replacing their dead daughter with a new, genetically identical daughter who will somehow erase the loss of their first daughter...