//.. JUNE 2004 / Vol. 1 Issue 4


HUMAN CLONING 101

THEY SAY: Human cloning will improve human life. Human cloning dehumanizes human procreation and treats human beings as laboratory products, as nothing more than carriers of traits that others find useful.

THEY SAY: Human cloning would help remove defects/diseases or prolong death. So-called "reproductive cloning" violates human dignity, robbing the child of a real mother and father and subjecting him or her to other people's pre-conceived blueprints for the "perfect" or wanted child. In addtion, attempts at live birth would involve the "trial and error" deaths of countless developing humans - Dolly the cloned sheep was born after 276 failed attempts - and any cloned humans who survive will likely suffer from devastating health problems.

THEY SAY: We can ban "reproductive cloning" but allow "therapeutic cloning" (cloning of embryos for research purposes). This is morally wrong, and is really no ban on cloning at all. It allows cloning, then requires all cloned humans to be killed at an early stage for experimentation. Such a law would not even be effective in serving its alleged goal of preventing the birth of clones. Once cloned embryos are available in laboratories, the would easily be transferred to wombs; then the government could not enforce the ban without taking the gravely immoral and unworkable step of forcing women to undergo abortions.

THEY SAY: Banning human cloning will impede medical progress. Cloning is increasingly recognized as a wasteful, unreliable and unnecessary path to medical research. Some scientists want to produce embryonic clones of patients with disabling diseases, so they can destory these embryos to obtain "stem cells" genetically matched to each patient. Yet any such effort would require creating and destroying literally millions of human embryos, and exploiting millions of women as sources of eggs so the embryos could be produced. In fact, enormously beneficial stem cell research can be done today in completely ethical ways, using stem cells from adult tissue, umbilical cords and other sources that involve no harm to human life. New cures can be pursued without creating human lives in the laboratory solely to destroy them.

U.S. Statement on Cloning to the United Nations, February 2002:
Human cloning - for any purpose - is an enormously troubling development in biotechnology. It is unethical in itself and dangerous as a precedent...It is also a giant step toward a society in which life is created for convenience, human beings are grown for spare body parts, and children are engineered to fit eugenic specification. We cannot allow human life to be devalued in this way.

Other contributors for this issue: Michelle Francisco