BS meter on high...what about blood-typing, organ matching, transport, storage, operating facilities, willing doctors? If I have the bucks for this, am I really gonna have them kidnap a local and swipe his kidney?
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.
It's not necessary to appeal to 'soul (I prefer spirit here, but we'll continue) of the individual in order to oppose reproductive or therapeutic cloning.
In modern Embryology textbooks, you will discover that the first principle of the Science of Embryology is that ‘every individual life is a continuum of unbroken processes whereby an individual alive organism is expressing its life, and that continuum has a beginning, a starting point that is that individual’s conception.’
Manipulations such as in vitro fertilization, somatic cell nuclear transfer (cloning), embryonic stem cell research, amniocentesis, and tests for genetic anomalies like Downs Syndrome, all are based upon this ‘first principle’ of Embryology. For these processes to have meaning, first the scientists and technicians must hold that the processes are dealing with an already alive individual’s characteristics, else the tests would be too non-specific to form medical assumptions regarding the alive individual organism tested.
Human whole organism cloning is accomplished by ‘somatic cell nuclear transfer’, taking a living cell from a donor human, removing the nuclear material and inserting that nuclear material into an ‘enucleated’ (nuclear material removed) female gamete, or sex cell, ovum, then zapping that combination with an electrical charge that stimulates cellular replication, expressing an individual human organism. The female ovum from which the 23 chromosome nuclear material has been removed, receives the 46 chromosome nuclear material for a ‘complete human organism’, thus the newly conceived individual life has the theoretical ability to then go through the entire series of cellular divisions (mitosis) which give rise to the amniotic sac and the growing individual human body, complete with all the normal organs and tissues.
‘Reproductive cloning’ conceives via somatic cell nuclear transfer and sustains that individual being all the way to 40 week developmental age and birth.
So called ‘therapeutic cloning’ utilizes in vitro conception and growth of an individual human being, but the new individual will not be allowed to live and grow to the full 40 weeks and be born. Instead, the newly conceived individuals will be killed and their body parts—from cells to organs¾will be harvested for use in treating diseases of or injuries to older individual humans (older than embryos). In truth, both ‘types’ of cloning are reproductive, but the end use of the newly conceived individual human determines which name to give the process.
Will individual human life continue to have sanctity or be reduced to mere utility?
Perhaps some believe it isn’t so wrong to conceive embryos and kill them for their body parts, their stem cells, but the processes will not stop there, with that level of cannibalism. There is ongoing effort--well underway--to build an artificial womb, and then conceive and gestate an individual alive human being all the way to the full 40 weeks of development and birth. This marvel will also allow the scientists to stop at any age along the continuum of the lifetime begun at conception and harvest the individual’s body parts … and it will be the owner of the conceived individual and the life supporting machinery that will determine when to kill and harvest, or support for birth!
Why is human cloning bad? … There are many reasons cited by opponents, but it is wrong primarily because the manipulation of individual humans in their earliest age as individual embryonic beings is dehumanizing … dehumanizing for the individuals so conceived for their utility and dehumanizing for the society, which embraces such cannibalism.
The moral ‘line in the sand’ ought to be determined by whether an individual human being is maimed, killed, or discarded in the process of manipulating that individual human lifetime begun at conception. Answer to that question is what our society is not being given in the current debates. And when some portion of the truth regarding these manipulative processes arises, the deeper truth--that even the embryo is an individual human being at its earliest age along its unique continuum of life--is obfuscated, dismissed, ignored, or denied.
Science may one day be able to reproduce a part of the whole organism, as in growing only a kidney that is a perfect tissue match for the individual from whom the genetic nuclear material is taken; that would be an embraceable medical miracle. But as it’s now undertaken, with ‘therapeutic cloning’, an alive individual being very closely matched genetically to the donor of the nuclear material is given life support until the organs of that individual (embryonic stem cells are the organs of the embryo) differentiate sufficiently to be harvested for use with an older individual being treated for a disease or injury. That is, in all truth, cannibalism as surely as if the medical personnel instructed the person being treated to eat the parts taken from the clone in order to treat the disease or injury.
[ To cannibalize, according to NEW WEBSTER’S DICTIONARY, is : to repair (vehicles or aircraft) by using parts from other vehicles, instead of using spare parts. Are human’s now to be reduced to the utility of aircraft or vehicles, to be cannibalized for their living parts? ]