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.

mtbopfuyn wrote: "I was with you until you dropped that adoption bs."

Which you don't quote. I will. I wrote:

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.

So is my "adoption bs" my calling adoption an act of "high charity and blind faith"? Or was it when I said that "adoption is a wonderful thing for some parents and some children"?

I love it when people kneejerk react to things that weren't actually part of what I wrote.

What I did suggest is that adoption is not risk-free, that there are such things as natural traits, and that in the absence of institutional memory within a family to know what those natural traits are, they might remain undiscovered and undeveloped.

Of course no truth today can be stated if it does not go along with the politically correct, and completely unscientific assertion, that all human beings are born tabula rasa, and that any child -- if just given enough love, prenatal Mozart, and educational mobiles hung above the crib -- has an equal chance as any other to have Stephen Hawking's mind or Michael Jordan's jump shot.

Frapster wrote: "so - if we make a clone for organ transplants how is that not cannibalism?"

And that was in my article where?

Oh, yeah. It must have been when I wrote:

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.

I purposely avoided dealing with the notion of soul (spirit) because an appeal to such is not needed, if the object is to establish the rightness or wrongness of exploiting individual human life. If you want a personal opinion, a recent offering from a respected Priest is sufficient: it is the soul that wraps the body, thus the soul is immortal thought he body return to dust. I believe the individuality of every human beings is established first at conception (and no ltaer than with first cell division, mitosis), as evidenced by the medical procedures applied to diagnose an individual's health even in embryonic age adequately support.

BearArms wrote: "No one has the right to torture another living being. And that is exactly what you will do if you attempt to clone a human with current cloning technology."

Your statement is out-of-context from standard medical practices, in which new techniques are perfected by experimenting on animals before trying them on human beings.

Now I'll get all the howls from the animal-rights activists.

The last two sentences of my article were:

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?

Didn't anybody read that far?

One point, just the one: you used the term 'fertilized egg, then relied upon that term to discuss the non-attachment when the zygote reaches the uterine environ; by the time fertilization is accomplished and first cell division is seen, there is no longer an egg; the egg is a haploid gamete at fertilization, then the conceptus is a completed 46 chromosome individual unique life, and by the time this dividing, growing idnividual life reaches the uterine environ, it is many more than a single cell thus it is identified as a zygote. Even the cells tasked to make up the placenta are also incorporated in the develeopment and formation of the gut of the individual.

Impossible to outlaw it; you can suppress it in the U.S.; it will move overseas. A technology whose time has come gets used. Period.

======================

I used to hang out on alt.sci.nanotech. Someone asked for the 'darkest possible uses' of nanotechnology the participants could imagine. I flippantly responded (thinking the moderator would prevent it):

"I plan to release a self-replicating nanobot that will convert every single human being on Earth (except me) into clones of Kathy Ireland. This may sound distressing to you but eventually you'll learn to accept it."

To my amazement he let it be posted.

There was this -shocked- silence for a few internet beats...

--Boris

Why should I, isn't it self-evident?

You can't, can you.

My questions in the last post were all about what criteria we ACTUALLY employ when judging human beings worthy of protection and respect for life.

We? Who is this, we? You had better have a mouse in your pocket.

I do not use your criteria. But that returns us once again to the question. What criteria are we using to define what is human and therefore worthy of protection?

MHGinTN wrote: "I purposely avoided dealing with the notion of soul (spirit) because an appeal to such is not needed, if the object is to establish the rightness or wrongness of exploiting individual human life."

You're begging the question, assuming your conclusion and attemting to prove your premise with it. If the value of a human life comes from its soul -- if there is consciousness that precedes the carnal body, or outlasts it, or can exist out of it -- then a body without a soul is an empty vessel, carnal rather than sacred. It is a fact to be determined before coming to certain moral conclusions.

MHGinTN wrote: "If you want a personal opinion"

And I'll stop you right there. You are entitled to your personal opinion. You are not entitled to use your personal opinion derived from faith as the basis for imposing law on someone who does not share your faith-derived premise. That is theocracy.

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.

You spent no time addressing those points, which I thought would be of interest to those interested in philosophical discourse.

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.

I'm challenging your premise and you just respond with a question about "what is human?"

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

BTW, the "we" would be human beings, as I don't know if gorillas or dolphins have specific ideas about what constitutes lifeforms worthy of protection. lol

Okay you arrogant ass, first you chide me for not offer an opinion regarding soul--and I did that because the soul need not be appealed to, if the issue is whether as human beings we will decide what is the value of human life, life of the individual human being--then you chide me for offering my personal opinion, and then you speciously assert that my personal opinion is what I based my argument for valuing the individual human being. You lack both insight and understanding. [You wouldn't happen to also be 'demosthenese the elder' would you, you arrogant self-aggrandizing donkey?] Now, try reading what I wrote, objectively, for content.

Motherbear wrote: "When did have a genetically related child become a constitutional right?"

On December 15, 1793, when the 9th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was ratified. It reads:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

On December 15, 1793, no state had a law outlawing clones. It was, therefore, a right held by the people then, and thereby constitutional protected by the 9th amendment today.

Don't you love it?

You're not getting something.

Even the right to bear arms, if written "human beings are endowed with the NATURAL right to own instruments of metal and wood that fire projectiles" sounds ridiculous.

Maybe the phrasing is the problem, but yes, the right to undergo a procedure that doesn't negatively impact YOU directly exists.

Do you have a RIGHT to eat pizza? Any right can be laughed away by rephrasing the larger concept into something specific and ludicrous.

And of course you know that the Constitution does not GRANT rights.

and brought up an enviromentalist argument against medical technology extending human life, but not much more.

It's not an environmentalist arguement it's an economic arguement. Since social security is a pyramid scheme how do we pay for prolonging life beyond a persons ability to not just become a parasite off the young and productive ? We are at the point now where taxes, and the cost of living are creating negative population growth in industrialized economies. The human race is heading a million miles an hour into a brick wall and no one wants to even talk about it.

MHGinTN wrote: "Okay you arrogant ass ... you arrogant self-aggrandizing donkey"

In other words, as demonstrated by your resort to ad hominem, you were unable to recognize the contradictions in your premises in the first place, and when I pointed them out, you threw a tantrum and started name-calling.

I'm done with this one.

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