Posted on 01/30/2003 10:24:04 PM PST by MHGinTN
The President called for a ban on cloning in his State of the Union Address. So, what's wrong with cloning?
Every individual life is a continuum hallmarked by growth and development. We are invited, through the media, to differentiate reproductive cloning from therapeutic cloning, but both conceive a cloned individual human being, in vitro. Scientists seeking to exploit therapeutic cloning would have us believe that, because their goal doesn't include life support to the birth stage, their 'form' of cloning is okay. Far from it; it's a worse application of the technology. Therapeutic cloning seeks to conceive 'designer' individual human beings, give them life support either in a growth medium or a woman's body, then kill and harvest from these individuals the target tissues for which the cloned being was conceived.
It is important to realize that an embryo IS an individual human being: goals of cloning scientists bear witness to the hidden truth that they are conceiving a unique human being, whether for reproductive or therapeutic aims. Giving tacit acceptance to a proven lie --that the embryo is not an individual human life-- is bad enough, we’ve done this for more than thirty years, but to embrace cannibalism founded on such a lie is far more degenerate.
Tacit acceptance for manipulating individual human life has lead from in vitro fertilization to partial birth infanticide, proving the bankruptcy of continuing moderate acceptance. We are now staring at cannibalism in the name of whatever you care to call it. Even an embryo no bigger than a grain of sugar is an individual human life. Is it acceptable to kill that individual for their body parts? If you think that it is, at least know that it is cannibalism.
If that is so, tell me exactly what is taking place in an identical twin embryo? Can one cell house two souls?
My issue with cloning comes into play when it looks like clones would be used as fields of harvest.
Hey, my liver is going bad so lets make a clone and cut that liver out and put it in me. Now I've got a problem if it takes a full human clone to produce my new liver. If science can clone just a liver for me and nothing else then lets get going on cloning.
Science is absolutely firm on the truth that an individual life begins at conception. Only one of two possible answers must be the truth about twinning: 1) within the single cell at fecundation (conception) there must exist the genetic quantity of two or more individual beings, or 2) something is in the first single cell of twins that will split the genetic material soon to express the two individual beings, some anomoly that will act to 'split the road' that is both of them at the start.
The point to focus upon is both twins originated in the first single cell at fecundation/conception. Every individual human being has its beginning as a single cell, the first age of its individual lifetime. If, within the first five days of fecundation, a second identical individual, or even a third individual presents and grows along the continuum of individual life, each of those individuals had their origin in the first single cell of fecundation. There is no other truthful conclusion possible. Within the first single cell at fecundation are all the individuals conceived in that conception.
Since it is a fact that an individual lifetime is a continuum that begins at fecundation, at conception, it is glaringly paradoxical to arbitrarily remove any age along that continuum in an effort to prove a later start to the continuum (kind of like saying you hold a single strand of rope, but then you cut the rope a foot from your left hand and assert that the after-cut rope is the exact same length rope you held before you cut a foot off of it AND pointing to the short tag of rope on the floor, assert that that piece of rope was never a part of the piece you were left holding AFTER you made the cut). If a person tells you that he or she originated at 18 weeks from conception, or originated when she or he took their first breath, or originated when his or her brain first had a thought, or originated when his or her heart muscle first contracted, or originated when her or his gonads first functioned, just remember, the lifetime of every individual human BEING begins at their unique conception/fecundation and to choose some other point to believe the continuum begins is absolutely arbitrarily illogical, not based in science or truth.
So, yes, with first cell division, at least one HUMAN BEING is present on the continuum of at least one human lifetime. With identical twinning (or more for that matter) all conceived individual human lives of that single cell conception are present.
Hey, my liver is going bad so lets make a clone and cut that liver out and put it in me. Now I've got a problem if it takes a full human clone to produce my new liver. If science can clone just a liver for me and nothing else then lets get going on cloning.
The problematic issue centers on the in vitro process. If cloning to reproduce a fully expressed, living individual human is the goal(and it's hardly a surprise there's nothing in the NT regarding cloning), no individual is being discarded. I still don't like the notion of designer individual human beings.
As to your other query, if science can someday grow organs using only your individual stem cells (and there now known to be throughout your body), I'm all for that!
The notion of designer individuals is a bit much for me to take and I suspect I would not take part in such a thing.
I don't image a clone would be anything other than a 'biological' replica.
A person is transformed into individual by their experiences and such so my clone might be subject to the same weaknesses as I am in that we might both die of heart failure but we will be individuals because our experiences are different.
If that is so, why then, cannot those lives be present in that single cell, that will eventually develop, even if they are to be 20, 30, or however many years later? Who sets the time limit? Why does that "anomaly" HAVE to be an accident and not instigated?
If said lives are present in the embryo to fill the amount of lives it will form before leaving the womb, what is to be said for the lives created from it after that time?
I do agree that experimental procedures shouldn't carelessly be used on humans so we should wait until its far more safe than it is now. But we have that for all medical procedures, I don't understand the logic in banning all cloning.
What really confuses me is how some Democrats are against cloning. They have no qualms about butchering unborn babies, but having a beautiful human life brought into this world is somehow evil/wrong? I don't understand it.
Where has it ever been said that people will be cloned so they can be eaten?
Even an embryo no bigger than a grain of sugar is an individual human life.
No,it's not.
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