Leon Kass on Cloning

New York Times ^ | January 24, 2003 | Leon Kass

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How One Clone Leads to Another

WASHINGTON — The failure of the last Congress to enact a ban on human cloning casts grave doubt on our ability to govern the unethical uses of biotechnology, even when it threatens things we hold dear. The new Congress must work to break the legislative impasse.

Opposition to cloning to produce children is practically unanimous in America: The vast majority of Americans oppose it. Most research scientists agree that it should be banned. Nearly every member of Congress has condemned it. Cloning not only carries high risks of bodily harm to the cloned child, but it also threatens the dignity of human procreation, giving one generation unprecedented genetic control over the next. It is the first step toward a eugenic world in which children become objects of manipulation and products of will.

Yet legislation that would have banned cloning failed to pass the Senate last year. Partisans on both sides of the cloning debate sought to entangle it with the larger debate about stem cell and embryo research. Disentangling the two debates is the key to passing responsible legislation that would prohibit this practice in the United States.

We first need to be clear about the facts. All human cloning begins with the same act: the production of a cloned human embryo. Cloning to produce children would involve the implantation of such embryos in a woman's body and their development to birth; cloning for biomedical research, in contrast, involves the dissection of these embryos to obtain stem cells (and, someday perhaps, the harvesting of fetal tissues and organs).

The political controversy is whether both or only the first of these uses of cloning should be prohibited — and whether, as a practical and moral matter, it is possible to stop cloning to produce children while allowing cloning for research.

The debate so far has been inadequate and wrongly focused. Supporters of cloning for research have often tried to confuse the issue by euphemistic distortion — claiming that the production of cloned embryos is not really cloning, that the embryos produced are not really embryos at all. At the same time, they have falsely characterized a ban on cloning for research as a ban on all embryo and stem cell research.

Excerpt --- The rest of the article is at

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/24/opinion/24KASS.html?pagewanted=1

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A clone is a clone, an embryo, a human being

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