This staff working paper
was discussed at the Council's January
2002 meeting. It was prepared by staff solely to aid discussion,
and does not represent the official views of the Council or of the
United States Government.
See also Staff
Working Paper 3a: Arguments for "Reproductive" Cloning
Staff Working Paper 3bArguments against "Reproductive
Cloning"
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the arguments presented in
defense of human cloning is the extent to which they have to stretch
and work to get around what appears to be an almost instinctive
revulsion against cloning human beings on the part of the public and
many scientists and decision makers. For reasons that many people
have difficulty articulating, nearly everyone agrees that they do
not want to see a cloned human being brought to term. What should we
make of this revulsion? Is it mere prejudice, born of ignorance and
of the fear of novelty? Or does it rest in some genuine insight?
Exploring and explaining this revulsion, which persists in
the face of what in many cases appear to be rigorous and internally
consistent analytical and philosophical arguments in defense of
human "reproductive" cloning, is a task that may have much to teach
us about the purpose and the proper role of bioethics in our times.
For if our revulsion rises up from deep within us, it may rest upon
and express a sense of our humanity and its meaning that we are
unaccustomed to expressing in logical, political and rhetorical
terms. Making an effort to express these ideas -- these human goods
-- in clear, distinct and rigorous form will help us see what is at
stake in the matter of cloning: what is at risk, what there is to
defend, and why it ought to be defended.
The arguments put
forward in defense of "reproductive" cloning tend to strike the ear
at first as more familiar and congenial because they generally
address themselves to subjects we are quite used to dealing with in
our political and public life: to individual rights, to the
satisfaction of personal desires, to the exercise of human will.
Modern liberal democratic politics is especially good at thinking
about these human goods and at providing for them. Arguments against
permitting human cloning have a far less familiar ring to them,
because while they do draw on some of the most prominent and
important liberal premises (for instance by pointing to serious
concerns about safety and consent, among others) they also draw upon
a rather different set of human goods, to which our politics does
not often address itself explicitly: human dignity and worth; human
bonds, both natural and social; the freedom that can come only from
certain sorts of limits on the human will; the meaning and the power
of our procreative nature and its relation to our mortality. These
are, in many ways, the highest human things, but they are not
always, and should not be always, political things; and so our
politics does not often think of them. We human individuals,
however, do think about them. They speak to us often more clearly
and directly than do the theories of individual rights and the
promise of comfort and even of health. For the most part, we are
quite well able to keep these two realms -- one higher but less
political, the other lower but more immediate and practical --
separate. But when the two fall into conflict, we are challenged to
prioritize among them.
The prospect of twenty-first century
biotechnology forces us to think of this, because it threatens to
bring the two realms into conflict. It does so precisely because the
powers it makes possible are to be used on the bodies and minds of
human beings, and in ways that go beyond the traditional medical
goal of healing the sick. In their quest for comfort and health,
advocates of human cloning seek to give new form to human
procreation -- and we must think of what that might do to all the
human goods that are connected in countless subtle ways to human
procreation. In their desire to empower human will, they seek to
break the mold of natural human limitation -- and we must think of
where a new standard of human behavior and dignity might come from.
In their quest for the empowerment of individuals, they raise
questions that human societies can answer only together -- and we
must face these questions and consider them carefully before we
decide how we ought to proceed.
All the human goods in
question -- individual rights, the quest for health and longer life,
the desire for a biologically related child, the desire for freedom,
human dignity, human humility and wonder, and the procreative
character of human life -- are of great importance to us; but as
biology and medicine seek out new powers, some of these goods may
come into conflict with others. It will be up to us, as individuals
and particularly as political communities, to address these
conflicts, and in doing so we must take an active role and not
simply let things fall where they may. The stakes are too high for
passivity. The promise is too great. The risks are too serious. And
we must deliberate carefully to reach the wisest judgment and to
determine the best course of action. In making this judgment, we
must understand and we must articulate as clearly as possible both
sets of human goods: not only the one we are very good at talking
about, but also the other, which we rarely speak of, but which we
find impossible to ignore.
The arguments in favor of human
"reproductive" cloning speak mostly, though not exclusively, in the
terms of human choice and human comfort and health. The arguments in
favor of refraining from "reproductive" cloning and prohibiting it
will speak mostly (though again certainly not exclusively) in the
terms of human dignity, human flourishing, and human nature. In both
cases, it is less the technical details of cloning that matter, and
more the meaning of "reproductive" cloning in relation to those
goods and those ideals that matter most to us all.
Opposition to human "reproductive" cloning falls into
several general categories, some of which address the more familiar
questions of safety, consent, and individual rights, but most of
which focus mainly on the larger human questions at stake in making
this decision.
1. Safety and Health
of Children and Mothers The first of these is a
concern raised by nearly everyone on all sides of the cloning
debate: the safety of all involved. Even most proponents of
"reproductive" cloning generally qualify their support with a caveat
about the safety of the procedure. Almost no one argues that cloning
is presently safe enough to attempt on human beings, and the example
of cloning experiments in other mammals strongly suggests that human
"reproductive" cloning is, at least for now, far too risky to
attempt. Safety concerns revolve around potential dangers to the
cloned child, as well as to the egg donor and the surrogate
mother.
Risks to the cloned child must be taken especially
seriously, not least because -- unlike the risks to the egg donor
and surrogate mother -- they cannot be accepted knowingly and freely
by the person who will bear them. The risks to the cloned child have
at this point led nearly everyone involved in the debate to consider
cloning thoroughly unsafe. In animal experiments to date, only
approximately 5 percent of attempts to clone have resulted in live
births, and a substantial portion of those live-born clones have
suffered complications that proved fatal fairly quickly.1 Longer
term consequences are of course not known, since the oldest
successfully cloned mammal is only approximately five years of age.
Some medium-term consequences, including premature aging, immune
system failures, and sudden unexplained deaths, have already become
apparent in some cloned mammals.
Furthermore, there are
concerns that a cell from an individual who has lived for some years
may have accumulated genetic mutations which -- if used in the
cloning of a new human life -- may predispose the new individual to
certain sorts of cancer and other diseases. 2
Along with these threats to the health and well being of the
cloned child, there appear to exist some risks to the health of the
egg donor (particularly risks to her future reproductive health
caused by the hormonal treatments required for egg donation) and
risks to the health of the surrogate mother (for instance, animal
experiments suggest a higher than average likelihood of overweight
offspring, which can adversely affect the health of the
birth-mother.)
These concerns have convinced most of those
involved in the field that attempts at "reproductive" cloning at
present would constitute unethical experimentation on human
subjects, and should be forbidden. These considerations of safety
were among the primary factors that led the National Bioethics
Advisory Commission to call for a prohibition of human
"reproductive" cloning in 1997, and the evidence in support of such
concerns has only grown since then.
Nonetheless, as the NBAC
report also articulated, safety concerns may well be temporary, and
could prove amenable to technical solutions.3 These concerns
constitute a persuasive argument for a moratorium or temporary ban;
but in themselves they do not get beyond the technicalities of
cloning to the deep moral, social, and ethical issues involved. The
present Council, given its membership and its charter, may be more
inclined to consider the meaning of cloning beyond its technical
feasibility and its safety record, and to look at the more permanent
significance of cloning as an activity that reflects on those who
engage in it and on the society that permits or encourages it. It is
in those areas of inquiry that serious and permanent objections to
cloning arise with the greatest force.
2. Consent Beyond physical
safety, the prospect of "reproductive" cloning also raises concerns
about a potential violation of the rights of individuals,
particularly through a denial of the right to consent to the use of
one's body in experimentation or medical procedures.
Consent
from the human clone itself is of course impossible to obtain. It
may be argued, on the one hand, that no one consents to his own
birth, so concerns about consent are misplaced when applied to the
unborn. But as George Annas and others have argued, the issue is not
so simple. For reasons having much to do with the safety concerns
raised above and the social and psychological concerns to be
addressed below, an attempt to clone a human being would expose the
cloned individual-to-be to great risks of harm, in addition to, and
different from, those accompanying other sorts of reproduction.
Given the risks, and the fact that consent cannot be obtained, the
ethical choice may be to avoid the experiment.
Against this
point it might be said that the alternative to cloning is for the
cloned individual not to exist at all, and that no one would prefer
non-existence to the chance at life. Such an argument, however,
could easily come to be used as an excuse for absolutely any use and
abuse of embryonic or newborn life. Giving life to an individual
does not grant one the right to harm that individual. It is true
that the scientist cannot ask an unconceived child for permission,
but this puts a burden on the scientist, not on the child. All that
the scientist can know is that he or she is putting a newly created
life at enormous risk; and given that knowledge, the ethics of human
experimentation suggest that the best option is to avoid the
procedure altogether.
Indeed, an inquiry into the purpose
and meaning of consent may well support this point. Why, after all,
does society insist upon consent as an essential principle of the
ethics of scientific research? The requirement for consent is not
quite an end in itself. It exists to protect the weak and the
vulnerable, and particularly to protect them from the powerful. It
would therefore be morally questionable, at the very least, to
choose to impose potentially grave harm on an individual, even by
the very act of choosing to give them life.
A separate
question of consent arises in light of the possibility that
individuals, living or dead, may be used as sources of DNA for a
cloning procedure without their permission or even their knowledge.
Unlike other forms of reproduction, including assisted reproduction
and in vitro fertilization, cloning could be carried out with DNA
from individuals who have chosen to be involved in a reproductive
procedure. While an egg or sperm donor may not consent specifically
to have the egg or sperm used in a particular reproductive
procedure, the donor has knowingly donated the sperm or egg, and
thus has consented to having them used in such procedures in
general. But since, at least in theory, the nucleus of any cell from
a given individual could be inserted into an egg to clone that
individual, and since cells can be obtained illicitly with relative
ease, individuals may find themselves cloned without their knowledge
or approval, and thus essentially forced to reproduce without their
consent.
A subset of this problem involves the cloning of
the deceased, who, like the unborn, cannot provide or deny consent.
Among the possible uses for cloning suggested by proponents of human
"reproductive" cloning is the opportunity it offers for parents of a
deceased child, or the family of any deceased individual to clone
that individual. Such an action, taken without prior permission,
could be a patent violation of the principles of reproductive
consent, though of course the individual whose rights are violated
would be unable to object.
In these different ways, the
long-standing insistence on obtaining consent for medical
procedures, and particularly reproductive ones, could be seriously
undermined by the advent of human "reproductive" cloning.
3. Eugenics and
Enhancement Human "reproductive" cloning could
also come to be used for eugenic purposes: that is, in an attempt to
alter (with the aim of improving) the genetic constitution of future
generations. Indeed, that is the stated purpose of some proponents
of "reproductive" cloning, and has been at the heart of much support
for the concept of "reproductive" cloning for decades. Proponents of
eugenics were once far more open regarding their intentions and
their hopes to escape the uncertain lottery of sex and reach an era
of controlled and humanly directed reproduction, which would allow
future generations to suffer fewer genetic defects and to enjoy more
advantageous genotypes. In the present debate, the case for eugenics
is not made quite so openly, but it nonetheless remains an important
driving motivation for some proponents of human cloning, and a
potential use of "reproductive" cloning.
Cloning can serve
the ends of eugenics either by avoiding the genetic defects that may
arise when human reproduction is left to natural chance; or by
preserving and perpetuating outstanding genetic traits. In the
future, if techniques for precise genetic engineering become
available, cloning could be useful for perpetuating the enhanced
traits created by such techniques, and for keeping the "superior"
man-made genotype free of the flaws that sexual reproduction might
otherwise introduce.
The darkest side of eugenics is of
course familiar to any student of the twentieth century. Its central
place in Nazi ideology, and its brutal and inhuman application by
the Third Reich, have put that science largely out of favor. No
argument in today's cloning debate bears any resemblance to those of
Hitler's doctors. But by the same token, it is not primarily the
Nazi analogy that should lead us to reject eugenics.
It is a
less dark side of eugenic science that threatens to confront us.
This side is well-intentioned but could prove at least as dangerous
to our humanity. The eugenic goal of "better" and "healthy" children
combined with modern genetic techniques threatens to blur and
ultimately eliminate the line between therapy and enhancement.
Medicine is guided by the natural standard of health. It is by this
standard that we judge who is in need of medical treatment, and what
sort of treatment might be most appropriate. The doctor's purpose is
to restore a sick patient to health. Indeed, we even practice a kind
of "negative" eugenics guided by this standard: as when parents
choose to abort a fetus who has been diagnosed with a serious
genetic disease. This "negative eugenics" may be morally problematic
in itself, but it is at least a practice that is informed by a
standard of health.
The "positive" eugenics that could
receive a great boost from human "eproductive" cloning does not seek
to restore human beings to natural health when they are ill.
Instead, it seeks to alter humanity, based upon a standard of man's
(or some men's) own making. Once the natural goal of health has been
blurred out of existence, medicine will come to serve only ends
designed by human will, and thus may have no limits, may feel no
constraints, and may respect no barriers. Reproduction itself might
come to serve one or another purely man-made end, and future
generations may come to be products of our artful and rational
design more than extensions of our humanity. All of this may well be
guided by what plainly seem like good intentions: to improve the
next generation, to enhance the quality of life of our descendants,
to let our children do more than we ourselves could do. But in the
process, we stand to lose the very means by which to judge the
goodness or the wisdom of the particular aims proposed by a positive
eugenics. We stand to lose the sense of what is and is not human; a
set of limits on our hubris; a standard against which to judge the
legitimacy of certain human actions. All of these, along with the
specific traits and characteristics done away with in the process of
eugenic enhancement, could be lost. "Reproductive" cloning may well
contribute to these losses.
Eugenics, and cloning itself,
may also contribute to an unhealthy belief in genetic determinism,
which could have profoundly negative social consequences. As we
become better able to manipulate and to control human genotypes, we
may tend to place greater importance on the genotype, wishing to
secure for our descendants every possible advantage. To a man with a
hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. To a society armed
with the power to control and change the genome, the genome will
suddenly look very much in need of control and change. The ability
to manipulate the genotype of an individual may tend to convince us
of the supreme importance of genetics in shaping an individual,
which in turn may lead us to want more control, in a
self-intensifying cycle pointing toward an increasing surrender to
an ideology of genetic determinism. Whether or not our control of
the genome actually turns out to give us much control over
individuals, our new ability may of itself be enough to lead us to
place undue importance on genetics.
It is essential to
realize that many of the social concerns raised below could result
from this very attitude. An excessive focus on the importance of the
genotype would exacerbate the social and psychological pressures to
which a cloned individual may be subject.
In addition,
eugenics may also open the road to a new inequality, by which only
those who can afford it can procure advantages for themselves and
their descendants into future generations. A situation in which only
the rich can grant their children high IQs, broad shoulders and long
lives would prove unbearable to a liberal democracy, and might
either lead to serious social tension or more likely to a government
entitlement to genetic enhancement and manipulation -- managed by
the state.
By serving the ends of eugenics, "reproductive"
cloning may open the door to all of these various difficulties.
4. Respect for
Nature Cloning also raises a number of concerns
about humanity's relation with the natural world. The precautionary
principle, which informs the ideals of the environmental movement,
may have something to say to us about cloning. It urges us to beware
of the unintended consequences of applications of human power and
will -- particularly over nature. Natural systems of great
complexity do not respond well to blunt human intervention, and one
can hardly think of a more complex system than that responsible for
human reproduction. This principle suggests that geneticists should
not pretend to understand the consequences of their profound
alterations of human nature, and lacking such understanding they
should not take actions so drastic as the cloning of a human
child.
The ethic of environmentalism also preaches a respect
for nature as we find it, and argues that the complex structure of
the natural world has much to teach us. Such an ethic therefore
disapproves of efforts aimed at simply overcoming nature as we find
it, and imposing a man-made process over a slowly evolved natural
process. It opposes the hubristic overconfidence inherent in the
cloning project, and fears that such a project may erase the
boundary between the natural and the technological.
In
addition, cloning, in the unlikely event it should become
commonplace, may diminish the diversity of the human gene-pool.
Sexual reproduction introduces unique combinations of genes into the
human gene-pool, while eugenic cloning aimed at reproducing
particular genotypes will tend to diminish that diversity, and with
it the "strength" of the species. Eugenic enhancement may thus
"weaken" future generations.
5.
Manufacture and Commodification "Reproductive"
cloning could also represent an enormous step in the direction of
transforming human procreation into human manufacture.
In
natural procreation, two individuals come together to give life to a
new individual as a consequence of their own being and their own
connection with one another, rather than merely of their will. They
do not design the final product, they give rise to the child of
their embodied selves, and they therefore do not exert control over
the process or the resulting child. They beget something that is in
essence like themselves; they do not make something that is in
essence their own. The product of this process, therefore, stands
beside them fully as a fellow human being, and not beneath them as a
thing made by them with only their own purposes in mind. A
manufactured thing can never stand beside its human maker as an
equal, but a begotten child does stand equally beside its parents.
The natural procreative process allows human beings -- through the
union of male and female -- to make way for fellow human beings, to
whom they give rise, but whom they do not make. It thus endows each
new generation with the dignity and freedom enjoyed by all that came
before it.
Even most present forms of partially artificial
reproduction, including IVF, essentially imitate this natural
process, and while they do begin to introduce the characteristics of
manufacture and industrial technique, they cannot claim to control
the final outcome as an artisan might shape his artifact. The end
they serve is still the same -- the birth of a child from the sexual
union of seed from two progenitors. Reproduction with the aid of
such techniques therefore still at least implicitly arises from (and
gives rise to) a willingness to accept the product of a process we
do not control. In this sort of procreation, children emerge out of
the same mysterious process from which their parents came, and
therefore are not mere creatures of their parents.
Human
"reproductive" cloning, and the forms of human manufacture it might
make possible, could be quite different. Here, the process would
begin with a very specific end-product in mind, and would be
tailored to produce that product. Scientists or parents would set
out to produce specific individuals for particular reasons, and the
individuals might well come to be subjected to those reasons. The
procreative process could come to be seen as a means of meeting some
very specific ends, and the resulting children would be products of
a designed manufacturing process: means to the satisfaction of a
particular desire, or to some other end. They would be means, not
ends in themselves.
Things made by man stand subservient to
the man who made them. Manufactured goods are always understood to
have been made to serve a purpose, not to exist independently and
freely. Scientists who clone (or even merely breed) animals make no
secret of the instrumental purposes behind their actions -- they act
with specific instrumental ends in mind, and the resulting animals
are means to that preexisting end. Human cloning threatens to
introduce the same approach and the same attitudes into human
procreation.
The transformation of human procreation into
human manufacture could thus result in a radical dehumanization of
the resulting children, as well as of those who set out to clone,
and by its effect on societal attitudes also a dehumanization of
everyone else. When we become able to look upon some human beings as
manufactured goods, no matter how perfect, we may become less able
to look upon any human beings as fully independent persons, endowed
with liberty and deserving of respect and dignity.
There is
also cause for concern about the dignity of the sources of "raw
material" in the cloning process, who are after all human beings
themselves. Of particular concern are the attitudes that the
industrialization of human reproduction might engender (and to some
extent are already engendering) toward egg donors. Wide-scale human
cloning depends upon the availability of large numbers of eggs,
which would need to be donated (or otherwise procured). With the
introduction of the attitudes and approaches of manufacturing into
the realm of human reproduction, women who donate (or sell) their
eggs for use in cloning could increasingly come to be seen as mere
sources of raw material, and in time may come to be pressured to
donate or sell, for the sake of life or science or progress. The
attitudes of modern industrial societies toward the sources of their
raw materials are well known, and turning human beings into such
"natural resources" is a worrisome prospect.
A further
concern along these lines has to do with the commercialization of
human reproduction that would almost necessarily follow from the
industrialization of cloning techniques. Manufactured objects
naturally 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
easily become a radically dehumanizing force.
"Reproductive"
cloning presents us with the potential for a market in clones of
particular outstanding individuals (as in some sense already occurs
with existing techniques when potential parents seek egg or sperm
donors with high IQs or deep blue eyes); or more generally for the
further encroachment of market principles and profit motives into
the realm of human procreation. Present techniques already point the
way toward a world of celebrity cell auctions and rent-a-womb
agencies, and the widespread use of human "reproductive" cloning
might very well get us there.
The concerns expressed here --
and, indeed, throughout this critique of cloning -- do not depend on
cloning becoming a very widespread practice. On the contrary, even
small scale markets, say, in celebrity cloning, could affect far
more than just the lives of those individuals who are involved in
particular transactions within them. The acceptance of such markets
by society would affect the way everyone thinks about the issues at
stake. The adoption of market terms and ideas in the arena of human
moral choices could easily blind us to genuine moral issues. The
reconceptualization of society as a system of rent-seeking, of human
life as a scarce good in demand, and of moral wrongs as mere costs,
could make us far less capable of reasoning thoughtfully about our
status and responsibilities as human beings.
In sum, human
manufacture, guided by market principles, violates some fundamental
principles of human dignity and moral conduct; and "reproductive"
cloning could make such violations easier and thus more common.
6. Identity and
Individuality The above-stated concerns about
the consequences of cloning as a manufacturing process lead into
broader and more serious concerns about the mental and emotional
life and the personal and social relations of the individual
produced by a "reproductive" cloning procedure. These concerns would
apply even if cloning was only conducted on a small scale.
The natural procreative process is uniquely capable of
endowing new human beings with a combination of rootedness and
family bonds on the one hand, and independence and individuality on
the other. Our genetic uniqueness and our genetic relatedness to
others both mirror and ground this social human truth: Each of us
has a unique, never-before-enacted life to live with a unique
trajectory from birth to death; and each of us owes our existence
and our rearing to those who have come before and who have brought
us into being and taken responsibility for our existence and our
rearing. By nature, every child is tied to two biological parents,
and that child's unique genetic identity is determined by what is
essentially a chance combination of these parents' genotypes. Each
child is thus related equally and by the closest of natural bonds to
two adult human beings and yet each child is genetically unique.
Both these characteristics, and the procreative nature of humanity
from which they arise and to which they point, help give shape to
the psyche of each of us, and to the human institutions that allow
us to thrive.
Our genetic uniqueness,
manifested externally in our looks and our fingerprints and
internally in our immune systems, is one source of our sense of
freedom and independence. It symbolizes our autonomy and it endows
us with a sense of possibility. Each of us knows that no one has
ever had our unique combination of natural characteristics before.
We know that no one knows all the potentialialities contained within
that combination. A cloned child, however, will live out a life
shaped by a genotype that has already lived. However much or little
this may actually mean in terms of hard scientific fact, it could
mean a great deal to that individual's experience of life. He or she
may be constantly held up to the model of the source of his or her
cloned genotype, or may (consciously and unconsciously) hold himself
or herself up to that model. He or she would be denied the
opportunity to live a life that in all respects has never been lived
before, and (perhaps more importantly) might know things about his
or her own genetic destiny that may constrain his or her range of
options and sense of freedom.
It may be reasonably argued
that genetic individuality as such is not an essential human good,
since identical twins share a common genotype and seem not to be
harmed by it. But this argument misses entirely the context and
environment into which a human clone would be born. Identical twins
are born together, before either one has developed and shown what
his or her potential -- natural or otherwise -- may be. They are
each largely free of the burden of measuring up to or even just
knowing the genetic traits of the other, since neither twin is yet
known to the world. But a clone is the twin of a person who is
already (or was) living. Moreover, he or she was cloned from that
person's DNA for a reason, and must therefore in one way or another
deal with his or her connection to that person and that reason. This
would constrain the clone's individuality or sense of self in ways
that differ in kind from the experience of identical twins. The key,
again, is the cloned individual's life as that individual
experiences it, and not just the scientific question of the extent
to which genetic identity actually shapes us.
In these ways,
even though genotype is certainly not destiny, the cloned individual
and the society around him may come to place too much importance on
the genotype, because as something known it is something which can
be analyzed. By leading this individual to be judged in relation to
his genetically virtually identical twin source in a way that others
are not judged, his status as a clone could turn that origin into a
kind of destiny, and might sharply constrain his freedom and sense
of identity. It could prove very difficult for the cloned individual
to step outside the shadow of his progenitor, and to live a truly
new, unique, and free and independent life.
The cloned
individual's sense of independence could also suffer because of his
status as a being made to order by another. Children conceived by
sexual reproduction (even with the aid of IVF) know that they, like
all human beings before them, entered the world as something of a
surprise. No parent knows exactly what to expect, and so every good
parent is willing to accept what comes and to welcome the children
as they are. This characteristic of human procreation encourages
parents to start off on their important task with an attitude of
acceptance and humility, and to start the new child off on its
course through life as one who is welcomed, whatever he or she turns
out to be. Parents, of course, will proceed to rear and educate
their child with certain aims in mind, but these aims tend to be
moderated and informed by the need to humbly accept the child they
have begotten, as that child is. A great deal of our sense of
freedom and independence derives from this vital aspect of our
relationship with our progenitors. But the cloned child does not (or
at the very least may think he does not) share such a relationship
with his parents. The cloned child will have been created by the
deliberate design of parents or scientists, and thus his relation to
others will be fundamentally different from that of naturally
conceived individuals. As discussed above, a begotten child stands
in the same relation to the world as his parents; a created child --
any kind of manufactured or designed child -- does not. He stands
beneath his parents and others in a way that children generally do
not: as a human artifact designed and constructed. This fact of his
origins almost cannot help but harm the cloned person's sense of
individuality and freedom.
At the same time that our
procreative origins endow us with individuality and freedom, our
natural connection to our family of origin also binds us to the
human world in ways that matter deeply. Personal and social identity
and social links of responsibility are connected in countless ways
to ties of biological kinship. The psychic identity of the cloned
individual, already troubled by a diminished sense of individuality
as mentioned above, could be much further troubled by the utter
confusion of kinship relations that would result from the
circumstances of its origins.
7.
Family and Procreation Just as the cloned
individual's sense of individuality may be confused by his origin,
his connection to others, and particularly to their own family, may
become muddled as well. Moreover, this effect could be mirrored and
amplified in the effect that cloning might have on the institution
of the family, and the way in which individuals and communities come
to think of procreation.
The clone's place in the scheme of
human relations will be uncertain and confused. The usual clear
designations of father and mother, sister and brother, would be
confounded. The clone would have only one genetic parent, his or her
connection to grandparents would span both one and two generations
at once, and every other family relation would be similarly
confused. Even if the child was cloned from someone who is not a
member of the family in which the child is raised, the fact would
remain (and may be known to the child) that he or she has been
created in the nearly precise genetic image of another, for some
particular reason with some particular design in mind. This is far
from the way children generally (and naturally) relate to their
family of origin, and the differences may tend to run against the
grain of the social institutions that surround the family.
It may be sensibly argued that some social arrangements
already in existence break the link between natural kin and social
family structure. A great many children, after all, are adopted, and
live happy lives in loving families in the absence of biological
connections with their parents. Some children are also conceived by
artificial insemination and various IVF techniques, and may have
unusual relationships with their genetic parents, or no
relationships at all. This is true, but it must be noted that all of
these existing arrangements attempt to emulate the model of the
natural family (at least in its arrangement of the generations),
while cloning actually runs against the grain of that model. Adopted
children, like biological children, are welcomed as they are
(sometimes more so than biological children), frequently before
their adoptive parents know much about what they are and may become.
They were not conceived with some specific predetermined end in
mind, and indeed they were not conceived to be adopted (nearly no
one deliberately produces children for the purpose of adoption.)
Their connection to the parents who raise them is not biological,
but it follows closely the model of the biological family: It is
based, in most cases, on a loving union of the parents aimed at
raising up a new and unique individual whom the parents did not make
but whom they wish to love, protect, and guide. It combines the same
genetic uniqueness and the social connectivity of the biological
parent-child relationship. Nothing about the adoptive child-parent
relationship prevents the development of traditional familial bonds.
The same generally holds true for children conceived through IVF for
the same reasons.
But something about the relationship
between the cloned child and the cloning parent may indeed interfere
with the development of these traditional social bonds. The
confusion created by the complicated relationship of cloner to
cloned may mean that no clear lines of parent-child,
sibling-sibling, or other familial kin relations will develop. These
vital links could be subject to serious confusion and uncertainty,
and so the model of the natural family would be very difficult if
not impossible to emulate. By breaking through the natural
boundaries between generations, cloning threatens to undo the social
links between them. A clone of oneself is a brother and a son, or a
sister and a daughter. Should you relate to him or her as parent or
as sibling? Neither relationship could take form very well under the
strains of the peculiarly muddled natural relation established by
cloning.
The point may be made thus: Existing family
relationships are either drawn from or based upon the relationships
that naturally arise from the process of human procreation. Cloning
not only does not point naturally to these relations, it actively
opposes them by undermining their foundations, especially the
relationships between generations. The cloned child's psychic health
and sense of identity may well be placed in jeopardy.
And
the family, as an institution, may be harmed as well. The family, of
course, is at once a social and a natural institution, and the two
elements reinforce each other in countless subtle ways. Breaking
some of the links between them could leave the institution of the
family without a firm grounding in nature and without strong social
support.
This may take form, for one thing, in the attitudes
of parents toward their roles. As stated above, parents who choose
to have a child at least tacitly acknowledge a certain humility
before the procreative process which is out of their hands. They
tacitly acknowledge the limits of their power to control, and they
implicitly promise to accept their child, whatever he or she proves
to be. This humility before the hand of procreative chance sets the
parents in a certain relation to the child, and helps set quite
necessary boundaries on the power of one generation over another. In
cloning a child, on the other hand, parents seek to exercise total
control over the outcome of the reproductive process itself. This
does not mean that they completely shape their child before it is
born: After all, there is more to each of us than our genome and our
environment. But it does mean that they control and -- even if they
do not -- that they will be held responsible for those things that
parents have until now been forced to leave to chance, and that they
therefore do not acknowledge, with humility, the limits of their
powers, but rather they approach procreation as an exercise of their
power and will. Rather than accept whatever child they turn out to
have given rise to, these parents determine in advance what sort of
child they will accept. The resulting child is much more the product
of these expectations than a child conceived in the natural way
would be. Such a cloned child is likely to be regarded more like a
possession of its parents, or even an instrument of their will, than
a normally conceived child would be. The parents begin their child's
life with an overbearing act that must be said to border on
despotism. They begin the new child's life by restricting the new
child's independence and individuality. The family, in this way,
loses something of its character as a nursery of a novel and
independent new human generation, and gains something of the
character of an instrument of the present generation. This does not
mean that the parents are ill-intentioned, but it could very well
mean that their children are less free to flourish. The character of
families thus changes in ways we may not like.
Other, more
immediately concrete, troubles may confront family life as well. The
parents of a cloned child may find themselves unable to treat a
child who is the clone of someone they have known (let alone of
themselves) in the way that parents may presently treat a child
generated sexually. Such a cloned child would be born with an
unnatural and perhaps unhealthy relation to someone (past or
present) in the world, and this could make healthy family life more
difficult.
In addition, the presence of human clones may
over time tend to undermine society's sense of what a family
relationship means and how it relates to nature, sex and
reproduction. The distance between the procreative nature of
humanity and the social status of the family could grow, and both
may become less thoroughly grounded in one another. That grounding,
as has been discussed, is vital for both, and its diminution could
bring with it profound problems. Family relations, and social
relations in general, are founded at the deepest level on mankind's
procreative nature, and on our character as begotten and begetting
creatures. Undoing that nature and that character may tend to undo
the roots and the foundations of family structure and family life.
Much about the way we live as human beings has to do with our
procreative nature: begetting and belonging condition the way we
think of our place in the world, our place among human beings, our
place in time, our mortality. Society is structured around all of
these things.
Human institutions, and particularly those
(like the family) that transcend specific times and places, are
storehouses of human wisdom. They possess in their very structure
more intelligence and experience than do the thoughts and ideas of
any particular generation. Undoing these institutions, as
"reproductive" cloning may begin to do, would very likely have far
greater repercussions than we can fully contemplate.
8. Impact on Society These
repercussions, moreover, would not be limited to the lives of
individuals and families directly affected by cloning. Indeed, the
impact of human "reproductive" cloning on society at large may be
the least appreciated, but among the most important, factors to
consider in contemplating a public policy on human cloning.
Cloning is a human activity, which affects not only those
who are cloned or who are clones, but also the entire society that
allows or that supports (and therefore that engages in) such
activity -- as would be the case with a society that allows some of
its members to practice slavery, to take a most extreme example. The
question before us is whether "reproductive" cloning is an activity
that we, as a society, should engage in. In addressing this
question, we must reach well beyond the rights of individuals, and
the difficulties or benefits that cloned children or their families
might encounter. The question we must face has to do with what we,
as a society, will permit ourselves to do. When we say that
"reproductive" cloning may erode our respect for the dignity of
human beings, we must say that we, as a society that engages in
cloning, would be responsible for that erosion. When we argue that
vital social institutions could be harmed, we must acknowledge that
it is we, as a society that clones, that would be harming them. We
should not ask if "reproductive" cloning is something that some
people somewhere should be permitted to do. We must ask if cloning
is something that all of us together should want to do or should
allow ourselves to do. Insofar as we permit cloning in our society,
we are the cloners and the cloned, just as we are the society
affected by the process. Only when we see that do we understand our
responsibility in crafting a public policy regarding human
"reproductive" cloning.
Since we are the ones acting to
clone, we must further realize that our actions will affect us not
only in what they directly do to us, but also in the way they shape
our thinking. A society that clones human beings is a society that
thinks about human beings differently than a society that refuses to
do so. We must therefore also ask ourselves how we as a society
prefer to think of human beings.
These sorts of questions are
not easy for a modern liberal polity to contend with. We are not
accustomed to thinking in these terms, and we are not comfortable
using them in political discourse. But cloning (along with the
accompanying broader issues raised by contemporary biotechnology)
forces us, as few other matters do, to think this way, because
cloning is a human activity that threatens (or promises) to affect
the very nexus of human societies: the junction of human
generations. Liberal society will not and should not seek to
regulate every sort of human activity, but it cannot help but
involve itself in those that directly affect its highest and most
urgent tasks: tasks like its own perpetuation and the transmission
of its ideals and way of life to future generations. Doing nothing
about such a subject is not an option. If we as a society refrain
from considering the question entirely, we would -- implicitly -- be
saying yes to cloning, with all that such a statement would entail.
We face the choice only of engaging in cloning or forbidding it, and
the option we select will say a lot about us. Given the issues
involved, there is no neutral ground for the polity to hold in this
particular debate.
Society exists beyond individuals, beyond
generations. And among the highest tasks of any society is the
management of its relation to the future, and the transmission of
its institutions and its ideals to the next generation. As we have
seen, it is here, at this vital junction of the generations, that
cloning threatens to wreak havoc, and this junction is
insufficiently protected by the market and by private interests. It
is here that cloning poses a special challenge to society, and it is
here that politics becomes important in meeting that challenge.
Politics becomes important because politics is the means
that a free society has at its disposal to protect its common
interests, to serve its common needs and to express its common will.
There is, in modern free societies, a very reasonable reticence to
bring politics into what is usually quite properly thought of as the
very private realm of human reproduction. This attitude is generally
a healthy one, but in some cases it is dangerously misplaced, and
"reproductive" cloning is such a case. It is so precisely because
"reproductive" cloning would affect more than individuals, and more
than the private relationships at the heart of reproductive choices.
The way in which the next generation will enter this world has
everything to do with the way in which our society will live into
the future. A society that produces children through cloning is a
society that thinks about children and family and the human
condition in a certain way; and we must be given the option, as a
society, to decide if that is the way that we wish to think about
these most important matters.
1. For further details see Working
Paper: Scientific Aspects of Human and Animal Cloning.
2. Some further examples of these concerns
about the safety of cloned children may be found in the article
reprinted in Working
Paper: Scientific Aspects of Human and Animal Cloning, Appendix
A.
3. Though it must be noted that however safe animal
cloning may become, the first attempt to clone a human being will
constitute an extremely dangerous experiment on the cloned
individual, since identical techniques have yielded vastly different
results in different animal species.
See also Staff
Working Paper: Arguments for "Reproductive" Cloning
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