Posted on 04/24/2003 12:24:35 PM PDT by J. Neil Schulman
I’ve written for The Twilight Zone. Let me take you there.
It’s yearbook photo day for Springfield Junior High’s class of 2025. Jason’s been avoiding getting his picture taken. His teacher wonders why until she looks in a yearbook from a generation ago and finds a photo of a student who looks identical to Jason.
A mandatory reporter, Jason’s teacher phones authorities. They investigate, arrest Jason’s father for violation of the Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2003, and place Jason in a foster home.
This law isn’t science fiction. H.R. 534 has already been passed by the United States House of Representatives. A final vote on S. 245, the identical Senate version, is still pending.
The bills should be defeated. They haven’t been thought through.
Cloning Human Organs for Replacement
Cloning is a potential form of replacing failing human organs. Right now the only way to replace a failing kidney, liver, heart, or lung is to cannibalize the organ from another human being. In the case of an organ such as the heart, which a potential donor could not live without, this requires a newly dead human body to cannibalize.
There’s always much more need for replacement organs than there are donors. Sometimes doctors let a patient die rather than extend resuscitation efforts because they know they have a patient who needs an organ transplant. In other countries, people are murdered to cannibalize their organs and sell them to the highest bidder on the black market.
Cannibalizing organs from other people also entails the risk of rejection because of incompatibilities, not only for tissue-typing but also for gross anatomical mismatches. Cloning organs, once the science has been perfected, which requires letting the research continue to fruition, has the potential of taking a human being's own genetic material and growing perfect replacement organs which are fully compatible with their genetic makeup. It would not necessarily require any killing in order to produce such replacement organs because they might be grown right within the human body of the person who needs them.
Human cloning is potentially a far better solution to the problem of saving the lives of people dying from organ failure than engaging in latter-day human cannibalism.
Making Twin Children
A human clone -- more precisely, a baby that is the identical twin of only one parent -- will be no less a fully human individual than an identical twin brother or sister.
Having a twin child might be the only sort of healthy baby which a couple might be able to have, just as in vitro fertilization and surrogate motherhood have already given children to other couples with reproductive challenges.
Just as one example, if there is a genetically transmitted disease or defect that one spouse in a marriage carries, and the other spouse does not, a couple wishing children carrying their own natural traits currently have no options.
Growing a baby from the genes of only one parent, the defect-free one, would allow the couple to have a child of their own without going outside their marriage. The holiness of their marriage would therefore be preserved without bringing the genetic material from an outsider, possibly that of an unknown stranger, into the sanctity of their marriage, adulterating it.
Another Potential Alternative to Adoption
Currently a couple who have barriers to normal reproduction for a variety of reasons must either remain childless or graft a child from some other family into their own family and hope the transplant will work. The euphemism for this act of high charity and blind faith is "adoption."
Preserving a natural family line is not merely superstitious worship of blood. Adoption is a wonderful thing for some parents and some children, but adoption does not preserve a family’s natural traits. If a child with natural musical gifts is adopted by a family that sees no value in spending money on violin lessons for a four-year-old, we could lose the next Joshua Bell. Likewise, if a family of violin virtuosos adopts a child from a non-musical family, forcing a musical education on a child without the natural gifts to benefit from it may prove both frustrating for the parents and psychologically damaging to the child, whose true gifts may reside elsewhere, undiscovered.
Invasion of the Family by the State
It’s no business of the government to dictate to a family how to have children. Only the arrogant hubris of a dictatorial regime dares to interfere with the right of free human beings to self-determine their own reproduction. The State has no rightful business telling parents how to go about having their own babies. It is blatantly unAmerican.
The War Against Science, the War Against Conscience
Laws which cripple the ability of scientists to pursue research potentially beneficial to humanity are destructive of free inquiry, and law should apply only in those cases where one human being is violating the rights of another human being. Regardless of those who claim the mantle to know the mind of God, human cells or even organs are not human beings and do not have human rights. Kidneys do not have souls. Livers do not have souls.
It’s a theologically debatable question whether embryos have souls. Some religious traditions maintain that a soul does not even enter a human body until the baby takes its first breath. It is a form of religious coercion -- government by theocracy -- to allow one religion's or sect's article of faith to dictate matters of personal conscience to people of other beliefs. It is destructive to the fundamental values of a free society for law to replace individual conscience on matters which, for those who believe, can only be answered in prayer to the Almighty.
Left Behind
Moving beyond the theological basis for moral concerns about cloning, it is self annihilating for a society to outlaw an entire field of scientific research. A society which declares war on science is relegating itself to the dustbin of history. It is crippling its economic growth, its competitiveness, its spirit of adventure. It is cultural suicide. It is damning one's progeny. It is making the human mind a prisoner to the fears of the ignorant.
Perhaps we do not know how to clone a human being safely today. Banning cloning and cloning research guarantees that we will not know how to do so tomorrow. It is a form of antiscientific terrorism, a form of Ludditism.
It is also the Sin of Pride, because it assumes that when God gave human beings that He cloned in His image independent minds, He expected us never to attempt anything new with those independent minds.
Back Alley Clones
When clones are outlawed, only outlaws will have clones. In a back-alley abortion, there is no surviving baby who will live to wonder, like an illegal twin would have to worry, like Jason, that when their yearbook photo is compared to their parent's high-school yearbook photo, it will lead to the parent's imprisonment for a Reproduction Violation.
Will the Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2003 lead to a future where we have orphanages and foster homes filled with displaced twins treated as second-class citizens because one of their parents went overseas or to an underground clinic to obtain an illegal pregnancy?
Who Ya Gonna Call?
Isn't it strange that when it comes to trying to figure out the ethical and practical problems that exist in the future, nobody in Congress even bothers asking the people who spend more time than anyone else thinking about the future -- science fiction writers? I'm a science fiction writer. I explored the ethics of cloning technology in my novel, The Rainbow Cadenza, which was first published twenty years ago.
No Congressional representative or senator has ever asked me to give testimony before a House or Senate committee.
People with no imagination should not be in charge of putting a red light on our future. I’m not saying introducing a fundamental new way of having babies should be green-lighted. But can’t a free society agree to an amber light and proceed with caution?
In addition to having written for The Twilight Zone, J. Neil Schulman is author of the Prometheus-award-winning science-fiction novel, The Rainbow Cadenza, which explores in detail the ethics of new biotechnology such as cloning. His newest novel is the comic theological fantasy, Escape from Heaven.
Copyright © 2003 by J. Neil Schulman. All rights reserved.
It is the first time scientists have used a technique called parthenogenesis on human cells.Parthenogenesis is a form of reproduction in which the egg develops without fertilisation. The phenomenon occurs naturally in many insects, while artificial parthenogenesis has been achieved in almost all groups of animals, although it usually results in abnormal development.
No successful experiments with human parthenogenesis have previously been reported. But researchers from Stemron report in the journal Stem Cells that they have successfully used artificial parthenogenesis in humans and that the cells taken from one of the embryos survived for a number of days.
From The Rainbow Cadenza by J. Neil Schulman, Simon & Schuster, 1983:
Jaeger looked back and forth between Eleanor and Vera. “Excuse an old man for staring, but I can’t help studying your remarkable resemblance to your mother. We don’t have very many clones in the habitats. Different eugenic goals, you know.”Vera concealed her annoyance; she knew the word “clone” was used less precisely in the colonies—the “habitats,” she must remember to say around Jaeger, if she didn’t want to provoke war. “I’m my mother’s twin,” she told Jaeger, “by parthenogenesis. The process doesn’t produce the various inadequacies that clones suffer from.”
“Forgive me my error,” Jaeger said. “I didn’t mean to insult you. But I must say it was rather my impression that such ‘inadequacies’ resulted from nurture rather than nature.”
“Hear, hear,” Wendell said.
Vera flushed deeply but avoided looking at Wendell. “Some people,” she told Jaeger, “reject any scientific conclusion that doesn’t happen to support their convictions.”
“Some people do indeed,” Wendell said.
“Maestro,” said Stanton, “you’ve just walked into the middle of one of the most hotly debated political issues on the planet.”
I love being a science fiction writer.
*sigh*
Writers co-opt every word they use for their own purposes. I'm a writer and I do that. But I'm not a liberal, therefore I'm not co-opting words for liberal purposes.
You can buy or not buy any argument you want, but ad hominem argument isn't going to impress anyone else.
Now you know something useful. Arrogant asses have their place in society, too. :-)
I agree that there's nothing holy about killing preborn babies. But if the soul enters the body at birth and the preborn lack souls, there may not be anything unholy about terminating a pregnancy, either. That is a theological question which has two wellworn sides, and I need to point out to you that the Old Testament view is that the soul enters with a baby's first breath -- a view also propounded by many Christian church fathers throughout history.
Which is beside the point since at no point in my article did I suggest experimenting on human embryos.
I did suggest that cloning technology might protect the holiness of a marriage from adulteration by outsiders -- fertilization from sperm other than the husband's, donated ova, or even an adopted embryo -- and while cloning procedures enabling the keeping of reproduction within a marriage might be a new thought for you, I think my point is valid and my use of the term "holy" is not mere rhetoric without substance.
One more general point. I don't concern myself with who might be offended by my writing, whether they're religious or not. God is holy; religion, being a human handicraft, isn't.
Funny, and I think futile, argument. In the first sentence, try substituting the words "adopted by" with "born to". In the second, replace "adopts" with "produces", and "a child from a non-musical family" with "a non-musical child".
Mother Nature is funny this way, and these things happen far more often than you probably think. This particular excerpt hit me rather personally. I am a musician, and have worked over the decades playing in orchestras which have included many musician couples. Sometimes, a child of such unions follows in the parental footsteps, but more often not. Of two couples I can think of who had 5 and 6 children respectively, not one of the 11 had more than a dabbling interest in music, let alone pursuing it as a career. Of all the offspring I can think of from some 25-odd couples I've known where both parents were musicians, only about three that I'm aware of are still actively musicians today, and a small handful of others stuck with music lessons beyond high school and sometimes still play at an amateur level. A wide range of occupations and diverse talents are represented by the rest. Two other musician couples I knew, incidentally, gave birth to deaf children.
I would bet that with musicians of as reknowned stature as Joshua Bell, a similar, seemingly random pattern is evident.
Oh yes, my "altered" version of your first sentence, by the way, describes me to a tee. My parents saw no value in music lessons for me at age four, because I had no exposure to any musical instrument till age eight, at school. But when that happened, there was absolutely no turning back. I brought music home and "introduced" it to my tin-ear parents, who were left wondering whose kid could have got switched with theirs at the hospital. (I look too much like them for that to be a possibility, though!)
You wrote, "The psalmist says that God knew me before I was born"
That sounds to me that God knew your soul before your soul entered flesh, and that interpretation is compatible with your statement that God wasn't referring to knowing "a clump of cells." We're now back to asking when the soul enters flesh, before the first breath or with it.
You wrote, "Thou shall not kill."
Mistranslation from the King James. The original Hebrew is translated: "You shall not murder." Hebrew has different words for "kill" and "murder" and the word for "murder" is used here, and nowhere in the Old Testament is "murder" used to refer to causing a woman to lose an unborn child. Nor is the word "kill" for that matter.
You continued,"The fetus is a human, and it is alive. If you kill it, you have broken God's commandment."
Citation, please, where the Old Testament uses either "murder" or "kill" with respect to the unborn.
Where you really destroy your argument is citing Exodus 21:22-24, which punishes a fight causing a woman to miscarry with a fine, but applies further penalties "life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth" only for harm done to her.
I note that none of your further citations are from the four Gospels, so I'll leave it that Jesus didn't find abortion worth commenting on directly.
Okay, why don't you just stop beating around the bush and come out and say that you don't like any of this research and you think all of it should be banned out right? With this definition, you've ruled out any multiplication of any human cells at all, including adult stem cells, adult organ cells, and the cells from underneath your toenails - any experiment that involves replicating any human cells in any sort of artificial way is rendered out of bounds by your sweepingly broad definition here....
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