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.
A baby may not be doing differential equations immediately after birth, but they sure feel pain, experience emotions, and understand that they do, in fact, exist.
I believe so
What is it that shows that a person exists? If those things are not noticed, yet can you be certain that the person does not exist, where he is certainly growing?
The matter, the substance of a person shows that one exists, and can quite objectively seen - for example, I exist because I'm here. However, it is the understanding that one exists - the "knowing" that one exists - as the determination of personhood. If I do not know I exist, if I cannot feel, or love or hate or experience life, then I am no longer a person. Perhaps, I would be technically, biologically alive, but I would no longer be a person.
No mystery in what I'm saying. It's in the Bible. It's also outside the realm of known, natural sciences. It is not ours to draw lines, where we run out of drawing materials.
I'm still unclear as to what you mean here. Perhaps you could give me an expansion of this thought?
What if you were assigned a blastocyst, but "its" life was terminated?
I don't think people are "assigned"
Does that which a scientist does not know by the scientific method not exist?
A rationalist scientist would probably say no, but I would disagree
inside of HTML brackets < > of course . . . and don't forget the quotation marks
For argument's sake, let's arbitrarily choose a point for the 'first' appeal to worthiness as an individual human being, then see if this application might be better served if we reach backward toward conception.
We will take the beginning of sentience as our arbitrary start of worthiness. That beginning would be dependent on form and function regarding the developing brain and our application of typical activity for the early brain (if we agree on brain directed/connected activity of the body as earliest sentience, rather than awareness by the individual organism that it exists; even the newborn is not sentient by the second application of the term sentience). It is relevant to ask, "Would this brain and body connected activity happen if the other ages of the individual organism did not happen prior to the onset of our broad application of sentience?" No, if the continuum of individual life is interrupted prior to this nebulous sentience, the onset of brain-body activity would not occur. If the continuum is halted in such a way that the continuum of development cannot start up again, the later expected ages hallmarked by typical future form and function cannot occur, for that individual life begun at a known conception.
Choosing a different age (instead of some hazy sentience) as our starting point, if we interrupt the continuum development of the individual life in such a way that we prevent the maturing of human sex cells, the individual in question will not have the capacity to reproduce a member of the species, EXCEPT where cloning of the individual could occur. Why is that relevant?... It immediately calls attention to the genetic reality of an individual human life. Science can now remove the 46 chromosome identity of an individual life and insert that genetic complexity into a 'de-nucleated' female sex cell to 'copy' the individual human life from which the 46 chromosome data is removed, starting a new individual life but not continuing the previous individual life by that special conception. And this may be accomplished from any age of the individual begun at conception, once the individual's complete compliment of chromosomes is present! Zowee, that's some continuum!
What does this indicate?... That the individuality of the life conceived is established at conception and first cell division (or just prior to cell division since cell division occurs soon after the 46 chromosome compliment is accomplished). The goal of cloning, in reality, argues for the individuality of the organism at its earliest existence, and that's why scientists doing this stuff consider the individual life to have begun at conception. Any point following conception that one applies an arbitrary definition based on defining the individual by form and function speciously disenfranchises the earlier ages of that organism, disenfranchises that individual life.
I would ask again, is that what our nation desires, unencumbered exploitation of nascent individual humna life? I would also argue that to do such, cannibalizes individual human life in its earliest age along the continuum of its individual existence begun at conception.
Fair enough, so the answer to your from before then is: I do not know if the "begining of brain waves or even brain cells indicates the beginning of a person", but this is the begining of a process that will make a brain, that will understand that it is alive, and this is when tissue becomes a person.
2. And about people in a deep coma, who recover -- do they cease to be persons, then become persons again?
You see this is a difficult one to answer because "coma" is a very generalized term and only one of a few different responses of the CNS to injury, but according to my criteria, I suppose one could make that argument.
People have self-directed and interrelational minds, emotions, wills, and as you say, knowledge of self, also of relation and responsibility to other beings. Science has no way of proving when these begin for a person any more than it has a way of proving what these phenemena are for a person, or when a person begins.
You're right science cannot prove the exact magical moment, but it can show that without a brain (1) you will not live and (2) you cannot know you're alive. Science can prove when brain development begins.
4,. I didn't ask you what you think.
Well I cannot answer your original question as I don't believe we're "assigned". It'd be like if I asked you something strange like, "What if you killed someone in a past life?" How would you answer? You cannot unless you believe in a past life.
5. If what you say is true, it's funny how different things exist for different people... and how more and more suddenly exists, as science goes on.
I don't disagree
Sounds like New Age "mind science" that you believe, by this post, not science and not a reverence for human life.
Not true at all. I just posit that there are certain necessary conditions needed in order for tissue to become a person. I am sorry that this bothers you.
Sentience
Richard Werner argues "that being a sentient human being is the relevant criterion for being a fully fledged member of the moral community, for having full moral rights. . . . "11 The argument is based on the idea "that we have no obligations except when some improvement or impairment of someone's life is involved ... [and] also that we have a prima facie obligation whenever this is involved."12
Werner states his argument as follows:
Simply put, one cannot make a creature's life good or bad, better or worse unless that creature is capable of experiencing and, in particular, capable of experiencing pleasure, satisfaction, happiness, pain, dissatisfaction, or anguish. One cannot help or harm another creature unless that creature is capable of help or harm, capable of having experiences consonant with help or harm. Clearly, a creature that has no experiences is not capable of having experiences consonant with helping or harming the creature. If the creature is destroyed before it becomes sentient, appeal to the better or worse condition of its future experiences is irrelevant. Hence, one cannot have moral obligations to a being that is not sentient and will not become sentient and, thereby, such a being cannot have moral rights.
In the case of a being that is not yet sentient but will become sentient, certainly we can help or harm this being by an action we perform today that will affect the future experiences of the being. However, it would seem that our moral obligations are not to the nonsentient being that now exists. So a being would not have rights until it became sentient.13
In reply, the mere addition of sentience cannot turn a nonperson into a person. If there is no person before sentience, adding this feature will not transform it into a person. An insentient frog does not become a person by acquiring sentience. And if there is a person after sentience is acquired, that being must already have been there, as the being who acquires this feature, as the same being who first lacks sentience then has it. Sentience comes about through physical development of the being who is there, before and after sentience is attained.
After sentience is acquired, there is a being who can function as a person on an elementary level; for example, he can feel pain. But his being a person is not affected by this; he was that already. An adult who is awake can function as a person: feel pain, think, communicate, etc. But he is equally a person, the same person, when he is under anesthesia, even though he cannot then function as a person since he temporarily lacks sentience.
Sentience, then, does not affect the being in question (whether person or not), but only a capacity of certain beings (persons, animals) to function as sentient beings, for example, feel pain.
To kill a small, very young, nonsentient baby in the womb, or to kill an adult under anesthesia, both are cases of killing a nonsentient being who, were he not killed, would wake up to sentience. The only difference is that the child was never sentient while the adult was. But this makes no moral difference. To kill the child is to deprive him of the only sentient existence he would ever have. If anything, abortion is therefore a still greater evil.
Suppose, through some strange disease, a baby were born insentient and did not acquire sentience until, say, age one. Would it be right to kill such a child after birth? But if not after birth, why before birth? If not when the insentience is abnormal, why when it is normal?
That a baby in the very early phases of her existence in the womb is insentient simply means that she is in a kind of deep sleep. This says something about the level of her development; it says nothing about her as a person. Clearly, sentience is not a place to draw the line. It represents merely the acquisition of another characteristic by the child in the womb, a further dimension of her development.14
Statement - On Human Embryos and Stem Cell Research...
One of the great hallmarks of American law has been its solicitous protection of the lives of individuals, especially the vulnerable. ...–one of the great achievements of the modern world–is founded on the conviction that when the dignity of one human being is assaulted, all of us are threatened.
Current law against funding research in which human embryos are harmed and destroyed reflects well-established national and international legal and ethical norms against the misuse of any human being for research purposes. Since 1975, those norms have been applied to unborn children at every stage of development in the womb, and since 1995 they have been applied to the human embryo outside the womb as well. The existing law on human embryonic research is a reflection of universally accepted principles governing experiments on human subjects–principles reflected in the Nuremberg Code, the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Helsinki, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, and many other statements. Accordingly, members of the human species who cannot give informed consent for research should not be the subjects of an experiment unless they personally may benefit from it or the experiment carries no significant risk of harming them.
...the Supreme Court has never prevented the government from protecting prenatal life outside the abortion context, and public sentiment also seems even more opposed to government funding of embryo experimentation than to the funding of abortion. The laws of a number of states–including Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Utah–specifically protect embryonic human beings outside the womb. Most of these provisions prohibit experiments on embryos outside the womb.
Can we win the war on abortion, first???
Some abortion advocates are willing to concede that unborn children are human beings. Surprisingly enough, they claim that they would still be able to justify abortion. According to their argument, no person-no unborn child-has a right to access the bodily resources of an unwilling host. Unborn children may have a right to life, but that right to life ends where it encroaches upon a mother's right to bodily autonomy. The argument is called the bodyright argument, and it is refuted in the following essays...
Why would it be wrong to kill an adult? Why would it be wrong to kill a baby after it has been born? Questions like these seems trivial, but their answers are extremely important to the abortion debate. What many people fail to realize is that most of the arguments used to justify killing unborn children could be used with just as much force to justify killing newborn children and, in some cases, even full-grown adults. The wrongness of killing is discussed in the following essays...
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