When Clones Are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Have Clones

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Some clones seem somewhat less than clonish. The outlaws might not get the results they intended.

April 2003 issue. Scientific American

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000DE213-6B0F-1E61-A98A809EC5880105&pageNumber=1&catID=2

Ma's Eyes, Not Her Ways

Clones can vary in behavioral--and physical--traits

By Carol Ezzell

One pig savors a ripe banana, whereas its cloned sister turns up its snout. Another always thrashes its trotters to get away when it is picked up, whereas the others nuzzle into a human embrace. Although clones have been described as identical twins, studies of the behavioral--and even physical--traits of cloned animals are showing that that is not necessarily the case.

Ted Friend and Greg Archer of Texas A&M University created the cloned piglets. They observed as much physical and behavioral variation among the members of two litters of cloned pigs (of four and five individuals, respectively) as among those of two litters of eight pigs bred naturally. Not only did the cloned siblings show distinct food preferences and temperaments, but they also varied in physical characteristics: some had more bristly coats or fewer teeth than others did.

The clones are "just like normal pigs," Friend concludes. "They're not at all like identical twins." Conditions in the uterus could play a role, he speculates. The two cloned litters were borne by different surrogate sows, and the dissimilarities are even more pronounced between the litters....[continued. Sorry. I read the article at the doctor's office the other day, but cannot access the entire digital version online without paying]

I spent a long post asking the question of what criteria we use to determine what is deserving of protection and how far that protection goes.

Humans deserve protection and no innocent human should be deliberately harmed.

Did that answer your question?

You ask me to define human, but ignore the fact that I question if "human" in the sense of possessing homo sapiens genetic material is the basis of the belief in the sanctity of "human" life. That's why I asked all those questions in that post.

That is why I asked you, “What is human?” If that is not it then what is it?

An individual lifeform possessing homo sapiens genetic material and capable of self-awareness. I suppose that is a good start.

Then Siamese twins are not human?

Once you move beyond the “homo sapiens genetic material” things get very murky. Which is why I draw the line there. I would rather error on the side of extending the protection rather then cause suffering to a fellow human.

My objection to cloning is simple, every time it is brought up it is always in the context of what "use" cloned humans will be to the rest of us.

There are two things in the universe. Humans and tradable commodities. Which is a human clone to you? You and every other advocate of cloning have expressed a desire to treat them as commodities.

I reject that a human can be a commodity. Human clones are human. Therefore I will do everything in my power to prevent them from being labeled commodity. I would rather not see the civilized world go down that path again.

No, you may not experiment on them. No, you may not tinker with their genes. No, you may not enslave them. No, you may not use them as living organ banks. No, you may not make use of them period.

Once it is accepted that you may not make use of a Human clone then the question becomes, Why would you clone?

Granted that there are a few vain people in the world who are sure that their genes are special and that they should continue on throughout eternity. But aside from them who would want to clone?

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