Important human goods can be traduced, violated, or sacrificed without being registered in anyone's catalogue of harms. The form of bioethical inquiry we are attempting here will make every effort not to truncate the moral meaning of our actions and practices by placing them on the Procrustean bed of utilitarianism. To be sure, the ethical principles governing human research are highly useful in efforts to protect vulnerable individuals against the misconduct or indifference of the powerful.
But a different frame of reference is needed to evaluate the human meaning of innovations that may affect the lives and humanity of everyone, vulnerable or not. Of the arguments developed below, some are supported by most Council Members, while other arguments are shared by only some Members. Even among the arguments they share, different Members find different concerns to be weightier. Yet we all believe that the arguments presented in the sections that follow are worthy of consideration in the course of trying to assess fully the ethical issues involved.
We have chosen to err on the side of inclusion rather than exclusion of arguments because we acknowledge that concerns now expressed by only a few may turn out in the future to be more important than those now shared by all.
Our fuller assessment begins with an attempt to fathom the deepest meaning of human procreation and thus necessarily the meaning of raising children. Our analysis will then move onto questions dealing with the effects of cloning on individuals, family life, and society more generally.
Were it to take place, cloning-to-produce-children would represent a challenge to the nature of human procreation and child-rearing. Cloning is, of course, not only a means of procreation. It is also a technology, a human experiment, and an exercise of freedom, among other things. But cloning would be most unusual, consequential, and most morally important as a new way of bringing children into the world and a new way of viewing their moral significance.
In Chapter One we outlined some morally significant features of human procreation and raised questions about how these would be altered by human cloning. We will now attempt to deepen that analysis, and begin with the salient fact that a child is not made, but begotten. Procreation is not making but the outgrowth of doing. A man and woman give themselves in love to each other, setting their projects aside in order to do just that.
Yet a child results, arriving on its own, mysterious, independent, yet the fruit of the embrace. Procreation can, of course, be assisted by human ingenuity as with IVF.
In such cases, it may become harder to see the child solely as a gift bestowed upon the parents' mutual self-giving and not to some degree as a product of their parental wills. They replicate neither their fathers nor their mothers, and this is a salutary reminder to parents of the independence they must one day grant their children and for which it is their duty to prepare them.
Gifts and blessings we learn to accept as gratefully as we can. Products of our wills we try to shape in accord with our desires.
Procreation as traditionally understood invites acceptance, rather than reshaping, engineering, or designing the next generation. It invites us to accept limits to our control over the next generation. Certainly, it invites us to remember that the child does not exist simply for the happiness or fulfillment of the parents.
To be sure, parents do and must try to form and mold their children in various ways as they inure them to the demands of family life, prepare them for adulthood, and initiate them into the human community. This concern can be expressed not only in language about the relation between the generations but also in the language of equality.
The things we make are not just like ourselves; they are the products of our wills, and their point and purpose are ours to determine. But a begotten child comes into the world just as its parents once did, and is therefore their equal in dignity and humanity.
The character of sexual procreation shapes the lives of children as well as parents. By giving rise to genetically new individuals, sexual reproduction imbues all human beings with a sense of individual identity and of occupying a place in this world that has never belonged to another. Our novel genetic identity symbolizes and foreshadows the unique, never-to-be-repeated character of each human life.
At the same time, our emergence from the union of two individuals, themselves conceived and generated as we were, locates us immediately in a network of relation and natural affection.
Social identity, like genetic identity, is in significant measure tied to these biological facts. Societies around the world have structured social and economic responsibilities around the relationship between the generations established through sexual procreation, and have developed modes of child-rearing, family responsibility, and kinship behavior that revolve around the natural facts of begetting.
There is much more to be said about these matters, and they are vastly more complicated than we have indicated. There are, in addition, cultural differences in the way societies around the world regard the human significance of procreation or the way children are to be regarded and cared for.
Yet we have said enough to indicate that the character and nature of human procreation matter deeply. They affect human life in endless subtle ways, and they shape families and communities. A proper regard for the profundity of human procreation including child-rearing and parent-child relations is, in our view, indispensable for a full assessment of the ethical implications of cloning-to-produce-children. Beyond the matter of procreation itself, we think it important to examine the possible psychological and emotional state of individuals produced by cloning, the well-being of their families, and the likely effects on society of permitting human cloning.
These concerns would apply even if cloning-to-produce-children were conducted on a small scale; and they would apply in even the more innocent-seeming cloning scenarios, such as efforts to overcome infertility or to avoid the risk of genetic disease. Admittedly, these matters are necessarily speculative, for empirical evidence is lacking. Nevertheless, the importance of the various goods at stake justifies trying to think matters through in advance. Keeping in mind our general observations about procreation, we proceed to examine a series of specific ethical issues and objections to cloning human children: 1 problems of identity and individuality; 2 concerns regarding manufacture; 3 the prospect of a new eugenics; 4 troubled family relations; and 5 effects on society.
Cloning-to-produce-children could create serious problems of identity and individuality. This would be especially true if it were used to produce multiple "copies" of any single individual, as in one or another of the seemingly far-fetched futuristic scenarios in which cloning is often presented to the popular imagination.
Yet questions of identity and individuality could arise even in small-scale cloning, even in the supposedly most innocent of cases, such as the production of a single cloned child within an intact family.
Personal identity is, we would emphasize, a complex and subtle psychological phenomenon, shaped ultimately by the interaction of many diverse factors. But it does seem reasonably clear that cloning would at the very least present a unique and possibly disabling challenge to the formation of individual identity.
Cloned children may experience concerns about their distinctive identity not only because each will be genetically essentially identical to another human being, but also because they may resemble in appearance younger versions of the person who is their "father" or "mother. But our genetic uniqueness is an important source of our sense of who we are and how we regard ourselves.
It is an emblem of independence and individuality. It endows us with a sense of life as a never-before-enacted possibility. Knowing and feeling that nobody has previously possessed our particular gift of natural characteristics, we go forward as genetically unique individuals into relatively indeterminate futures.
These new and unique genetic identities are rooted in the natural procreative process. Indeed, one of the reasons some people are interested in cloning is that the technique promises to produce in each case a particular individual whose traits and characteristics are already known. And however much or little one's genotype actually shapes one's natural capacities, it could mean a great deal to an individual's experience of life and the expectations that those who cloned him or her might have.
The cloned child may be constantly compared to "the original," and may consciously or unconsciously hold himself or herself up to the genetic twin that came before.
If the two individuals turned out to lead similar lives, the cloned person's achievements may be seen as derivative. If, as is perhaps more likely, the cloned person departed from the life of his or her progenitor, this very fact could be a source of constant scrutiny, especially in circumstances in which parents produced their cloned child to become something in particular.
Living up to parental hopes and expectations is frequently a burden for children; it could be a far greater burden for a cloned individual. The shadow of the cloned child's "original" might be hard for the child to escape, as would parental attitudes that sought in the child's very existence to replicate, imitate, or replace the "original.
It may reasonably be argued that genetic individuality is not an indispensable human good, since identical twins share a common genotype and seem not to be harmed by it.
But this argument misses the context and environment into which even a single human clone would be born. Each is largely free of the burden of measuring up to or even knowing in advance the genetic traits of the other, because both begin life together and neither is yet known to the world.
But a clone is a genetic near-copy of a person who is already living or has already lived. This might constrain the clone's sense of self in ways that differ in kind from the experience of identical twins.
What matters is the cloned individual's perception of the significance of the "precedent life" and the way that perception cramps and limits a sense of self and independence.
The likely impact of cloning on identity suggests an additional moral and social concern: the transformation of human procreation into human manufacture, of begetting into making. By using the terms "making" and "manufacture" we are not claiming that cloned children would be artifacts made altogether "by hand" or produced in factories.
Rather, we are suggesting that they would, like other human "products," be brought into being in accordance with some pre-selected genetic pattern or design, and therefore in some sense "made to order" by their producers or progenitors.
Cloned children would thus be the first human beings whose entire genetic makeup is selected in advance. True, selection from among existing genotypes is not yet design of new ones. But the principle that would be established by human cloning is both far-reaching and completely novel: parents, with the help of science and technology, may determine in advance the genetic endowment of their children.
To this point, parents have the right and the power to decide whether to have a child. With cloning, parents acquire the power, and presumably the right, to decide what kind of a child to have. Of course, there is no denying that we have already taken steps in the direction of such control. With regard to positive selection for desired traits, some people already engage in the practice of sex selection, another example of conditional acceptance of offspring.
But these precedents pale in comparison to the degree of control provided by cloning and, in any case, do not thereby provide a license to proceed with cloning. It is far from clear that it would be wise to proceed still farther in our attempts at control.
The problem with cloning-to-produce-children is not that artificial technique is used to assist reproduction. Neither is it that genes are being manipulated. The problem has to do with the control of the entire genotype and the production of children to selected specifications.
Why does this matter? It matters because human dignity is at stake. In natural procreation, two individuals give life to a new human being whose endowments are not shaped deliberately by human will, whose being remains mysterious, and the open-endedness of whose future is ratified and embraced.
Children born of this process stand equally beside their progenitors as fellow human beings, not beneath them as made objects. In this way, the uncontrolled beginnings of human procreation endow each new generation and each new individual with the dignity and freedom enjoyed by all who came before. Most present forms of assisted reproduction imitate this natural process.
While they do begin to introduce characteristics of manufacture and industrial technique, placing nascent human life for the first time in human hands, they do not control the final outcome. The end served by IVF is still the same as natural reproduction-the birth of a child from the union of gametes from two progenitors. Reproduction with the aid of such techniques still implicitly expresses a willingness to accept as a gift the product of a process we do not control.
In IVF children emerge out of the same mysterious process from which their parents came, and are therefore not mere creatures of their parents. Here, the process begins with a very specific final product in mind and would be tailored to produce that product. Even were cloning to be used solely to remedy infertility, the decision to clone the sterile father would be a decision, willy-nilly, that the child-to-be should be the near-twin of his "father.
In every case of cloning-to-produce-children, scientists or parents would set out to produce specific individuals for particular reasons. The procreative process could come to be seen increasingly as a means of meeting specific ends, and the resulting children would be products of a designed manufacturing process, products over whom we might think it proper to exercise "quality control.
We would learn to receive the next generation less with gratitude and surprise than with control and mastery. One possible result would be the industrialization and commercialization of human reproduction.
Manufactured objects become commodities in the marketplace, and their manufacture comes to be guided by market principles and financial concerns. When the "products" are human beings, the "market" could become a profoundly dehumanizing force. Already there is commerce in egg donation for IVF, with ads offering large sums of money for egg donors with high SAT scores and particular physical features.
The concerns expressed here do not depend on cloning becoming a widespread practice. The introduction of the terms and ideas of production into the realm of human procreation would be troubling regardless of the scale involved; and the adoption of a market mentality in these matters could blind us to the deep moral character of bringing forth new life. Even were cloning children to be rare, the moral harms to a society that accepted it could be serious.
For some of us, cloning-to-produce-children also raises concerns about the prospect of eugenics or, more modestly, about genetic "enhancement. It does not ordinarily refer to actions of particular individuals attempting to improve the genetic endowment of their own descendants. Yet, although cloning does not in itself point to public policies by which the state would become involved in directing the development of the human gene pool, this might happen in illiberal regimes, like China, where the government already regulates procreation.
Some people, in fact, see enhancement as the major purpose of cloning-to-produce-children. Those who favor eugenics and genetic enhancement were once far more open regarding their intentions to enable future generations to enjoy more advantageous genotypes. Toward these ends, they promoted the benefits of cloning: escape from the uncertain lottery of sex, controlled and humanly directed reproduction.
In the present debate about cloning-to-produce-children, the case for eugenics and enhancement is not made openly, but it nonetheless remains an important motivation for some advocates. Cloning can serve the ends of individualized enhancement either by avoiding the genetic defects that may arise when human reproduction is left to chance or by preserving and perpetuating outstanding genetic traits. In the future, if techniques of genetic enhancement through more precise genetic engineering became available, cloning could be useful for perpetuating the enhanced traits and for keeping any "superior" manmade genotype free of the flaws that sexual reproduction might otherwise introduce.
Nonetheless, it could prove dangerous to our humanity. Besides the dehumanizing prospects of the turn toward manufacture that such programs of enhancement would require, there is the further difficulty of the lack of standards to guide the choices for "improvement. To be sure, there are differing views about how to define "health. The "positive" eugenics that could receive a great boost from human cloning, especially were it to be coupled with techniques of precise genetic modification, would not seek to restore sick human beings to natural health.
Instead, it would seek to alter humanity, based upon subjective or arbitrary ideas of excellence. The effort may be guided by apparently good intentions: to improve the next generation and to enhance the quality of life of our descendants. But in the process of altering human nature, we would be abandoning the standard by which to judge the goodness or the wisdom of the particular aims. We would stand to lose the sense of what is and is not human. The fear of a new eugenics is not, as is sometimes alleged, a concern born of some irrational fear of the future or the unknown.
Neither is it born of hostility to technology or nostalgia for some premodern pseudo-golden age of superior naturalness. It is rather born of the rational recognition that once we move beyond therapy into efforts at enhancement, we are in uncharted waters without a map, without a compass, and without a clear destination that can tell us whether we are making improvements or the reverse.
The time-honored and time-tested goods of human life, which we know to be good, would be put in jeopardy for the alleged and unknowable goods of a post-human future. Cloning-to-produce-children could also prove damaging to family relations, despite the best of intentions. We do not assume that cloned children, once produced, would not be accepted, loved, or nurtured by their parents and relatives.
On the contrary, we freely admit that, like any child, they might be welcomed into the cloning family. Nevertheless, the cloned child's place in the scheme of family relations might well be uncertain and confused. The usually clear designations of father and brother, mother and sister, would be confounded.
A mother could give birth to her own genetic twin, and a father could be genetically virtually identical to his son. The cloned child's relation to his or her grandparents would span one and two generations at once.
Every other family relation would be similarly confused. There is, of course, the valid counter-argument that holds that the "mother" could easily be defined as the person who gives birth to the child, regardless of the child's genetic origins, and for social purposes that may serve to eliminate some problems. But because of the special nature of cloning-to-produce-children, difficulties may be expected.
The crucial point is not the absence of the natural biological connections between parents and children. The crucial point is, on the contrary, the presence of a unique, one-sided, and replicative biological connection to only one progenitor.
As a result, family relations involving cloning would differ from all existing family arrangements, including those formed through adoption or with the aid of IVF. A great many children, after all, are adopted, and live happy lives in loving families, in the absence of any biological connections with their parents.
Children conceived by artificial insemination using donor sperm and by various IVF techniques may have unusual relationships with their genetic parents, or no genetic relationships at all. But all of these existing arrangements attempt in important ways to emulate the model of the natural family at least in its arrangement of the generations , while cloning runs contrary to that model.
What the exact effects of cloning-to-produce-children might be for families is highly speculative, to be sure, but it is still worth flagging certain troubling possibilities and risks. The fact that the cloned child bears a special tie to only one parent may complicate family dynamics.
As the child developed, it could not help but be regarded as specially akin to only one of his or her parents. The sins or failings of the father or mother , if reappearing in the cloned child, might be blamed on the progenitor, adding to the chances of domestic turmoil.
The problems of being and rearing an adolescent could become complicated should the teenage clone of the mother "reappear" as the double of the woman the father once fell in love with. Risks of competition, rivalry, jealousy, and parental tension could become heightened.
Even if the child were cloned from someone who is not a member of the family in which the child is raised, the fact would remain that he or she has been produced in the nearly precise genetic image of another and for some particular reason, with some particular design in mind. In the second creation story Genesis, chapter two , man's role is more that of steward. He is to care for creation and protect it. Now the ethical direction would be just the opposite and cloning might be considered a violation of stewardship.
Scripture is an important source of ethical direction for all Judeo-Christian religious people, but since scripture provides no specific answers to contemporary scientific problems, biblical ethicists have to think through the issue of cloning very much like all others do.
Jewish ethicists tend to look for ethical direction both from scripture and from the Talmud Jewish law and tradition.
Rabbi Moses Tendler, a professor of medical ethics, looked at cloning using the talmudic metaphor of the bee which offers both honey and a sting. Are we, he asked, at the point on the tree of knowledge where we'd rather give up the honey to avoid the sting?
Other rabbis saw no reason to criticize or even to regulate cloning. Most religious ethicists consider human cloning to be wrong. The most permissive among them urge great caution in using this kind of genetic manipulation. Science however has its own ethicists and generally they take the opposite view. Scientists tend to focus on the positive benefits of cloning and discount the dangers. They tend to take predictions of catastrophic consequences seriously.
Scientists can be trusted to do their own ethics, they claim. They even have their own ethical heroes, scientific saints of sorts Galileo, Bacon.
Science's ethicists emphasize the possibilities of conquering disease and infertility. They focus on new information about cell functioning which will aid in the fight against cancer.
Cloning might also protect against certain genetic diseases which result from combining genes from both parents. But science has its own history of ethical scandals and the idea that people should just let scientists do what they think is right, convinces almost no one.
James Watson, who won the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA, agreed that this issue could not be left to science. If science doesn't like ethical restrictions, neither does business. Spokespersons for business interests in the Economist lined up with scientists against any talk about restricting cloning.
Business interests are more concerned about animal than about human cloning. They do not want the business possibilities of cloning animals to be ruined by worries about human cloning.
Literature, like religion, is an important source of ethics. Novelists and poets provide ethical viewpoints and several have already taken very critical stands on cloning. Mary Shelly's novel "Frankenstein" was the first such negative evaluation. Shelly's Frankenstein was intelligent and articulate, but deeply anguished by his unnatural origin.
In this story, he goes mad with grief and murders the doctor who made him. Through the influence created by its funding, the government has for years required strict ethical controls over genetic research and therapy involving human beings.
Immediately after the recent cloning news, President Clinton temporarily banned the use of federal money for human cloning experiments. Not long after the President's decree, one Republican Congressman Representative Vernon Elders of Michigan proposed a ban on human cloning because it might create a negative reaction to animal cloning and thereby hurt business.
No telling what congress will do, but even if the government prohibits cloning, it sitll leaves the marketplace as an alternative base for cloning activities. Bioethicists are relativeliy new players on the broad stage of ethical reflection. Bioethics has its own background theories and abstract principles and paradigm stories, but it moves from these broad ethical perspectives to concrete norms and rules and policies.
What we expect from bioethics is less inspiration and more practical guidelines for what we can and cannot do in science and medicine. Bioethicists have been at work in the area of genetics since shortly after the discovery of DNA. They make a distinction between somatic cell and germline cell genetic interventions. The former refers to treatments of genetic disease by introducing a properly functioning gene into one person in whom that gene is defective.
Somatic cell therapy affects only the person suffering from a recognized genetic disease. It is distinguished from germline therapy which involves changes in an ovum or sperm and therefore involves gene alterations which will be passed down to other generations.
Here is an example of bioethical standards or guidelines for somatic cell gene interventions on human beings. Cloning would be an example of germline genetic intervention. It is more difficult to get approval for germline interventions for many reasons, including the fact that germline cell alterations are difficult to transfer and therefore have limited effectiveness. It took hundreds of tries to clone Dolly. Germline ethical standards, added to the above mentioned ones, are more stringent:.
All the presently in-place bioethical guidelines would militate against approval of cloning at the present time. The recent cloning of sheep and monkeys make successful human cloning almost a certainty and overcomes an objection based on lack of success. But would human cloning offer substantial usefulness? Ian Wilmut, who cloned the lamb, expressed opposition to human cloning. People are not thinking carefully, he said, and he could see no useful application of his cloning techniques to humans.
Wilmut's ethical reservations about human cloning might also be based on criterion 3. Human cloning certainly alters the basic relationship between the cloned person and the "parent" genetic ancestor. And any extensive use of cloning would violate guideline 4 by creating a risk to the gene pool and gentic diversity.
The present limited therapeutic applications of cloning make it likely that cloning would be done in order to make design changes in the human species eugenics.
But how do we decide what changes in the human species are appropriate? What sort of persons should we be? Moreover, it is against ethical values as well. According to modern studies, Human moral values are preferred rather than emotions, but they cannot be ignored.
Despite the progress in the stem cell culture, it is still unable to avail the therapeutic benefits. It is said that cloning could be done in the near future, and it is closer to the reality and away from science fiction. Cloning can be carried out by two techniques termed as the somatic cell nuclear transfer and cell mass division.
The cloned animal products obtained by the somatic cell nuclear transfer can be used, as they cause no harm and are safe as the noncloned animal products are. Certain harms are related to the twin's growth produced by the cloning procedure that also reinforces on the inhibition of human cloning, as it causes the psychological distress and destroys the universality of an individual, as well as certain ethical and moral values despite which human clones cannot be made.
Resulting of all these give rise to a great controversy that either clone of human beings should be produced or not. Although in the near future, the possibility of human clones and their use for different purposes cannot be ignored. Keywords: Cell mass division, dolly sheep, human embryo, somatic cell nuclear transfer. Users Online: Steensma DP. Leuk Res ; Haldane JB. Biological possibilities in the next ten thousand years. In: Wolstenholme G, editor. Man and his Future.
Boston, MA: Little, Brown; Lederberg J. Experimental genetics and human evolution. Am Nat ; Shapiro HT. Ethical and policy issues of human cloning. Science ; Galton DJ, Doyal L. J Med Ethics ;
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