SECTION: CAPITOL HILL HEARING TESTIMONY

LENGTH: 1728 words

COMMITTEE: HOUSE JUDICIARY

SUBCOMMITTEE: CRIME

HEADLINE: HUMAN CLONING BAN

TESTIMONY-BY: DR. JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN, PH.D, THE LAURA SPELMAN ROCKEFELLER PROFESSOR

AFFILIATION: SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ETHICS / THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

BODY:
June 19, 2001

Testimony of Dr. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Ph.D. The Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor Of Social and Political Ethics The University of Chicago

Before the United States House of Representatives Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Crime

Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to offer reflections on the political and ethical issues presented by the prospect of human cloning. I am Jean Bethke Elshtain. I teach social and political ethics at the University of Chicago where I am a member of the Divinity School and the Department of Political Science. My work for nearly thirty years now has been devoted to examining the ethical implications of political and social policies and proposals. I consider myself a hard-headed realist, one obliged, therefore, to avoid utopian scenarios that assure us that paradise is just around the corner if only we implement this ideology or enact this policy and, as well, to challenge dark, nightmarish sketches of what the future will hold if a certain proposal is implemented or a technology developed. That said, it seems clear to me that the path down which we are headed unless we intervene now to stop human cloning is one that will deliver harm in abundance-and that harm can be stated clearly and decisively now- whereas any potential benefits are highly speculative and likely to be achievable through less drastic and damaging methods, in any case. The harms, in other words, are known-not a matter of speculation-whereas the hypothesized benefits are a matter of conjecture, in some cases rather far- fetched conjecture: this according to the bulk of current scientific opinion. One of the basic rules of medicine is also a basic rule of politics: first, do no harm. We are on the pathway to harm. That is why I support H.R. 1644, the "Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2001." Last August, I was in Berlin, Germany, for an international conference. On that occasion, the Lutheran Bishop of Berlin presented a talk in which he expressed alarm at the direction much of the genetic ideology of the present-not science, but an ideology that piggy- backs off scientific and technological developments and prospects-tends. That ideology increasingly identifies the true essence of what is human with a particular genotype. This ushers into a kind of genetic fundamentalism that reduces our humanity to the clusters of traits we phenotypically exhibit, or fail to--everything from desirable height, hair and eye color, skin color, I.Q., physical attractiveness, and so on. The hope of genetic fundamentalists is that we can increasingly control for that which is deemed desirable and eliminate that which is not. The aim in all this is not to prevent devastating illnesses but precisely to reflect and to reinforce certain societal prejudices in and through genetic selection. There is a word for this so-called 'genetic enhancement'. That word is eugenics. Human cloning belongs to this eugenics project. All the ethical, political, scientific , and juridical arguments against eugenics apply to the prospect of human cloning. Hans Jonas, the distinguished philosopher and scientist, has already written that cloning is "both in method the most despotic and in aim the most slavish form of genetic manipulation; its objective is not an arbitrary modification of the hereditary material but precisely its equally arbitrary fixation in contrast to the dominant strategy of nature."

Public policy reflects our understanding of who we are as a people. It indicates where we are going and our appreciation of where we have been. Americans are a strong, but not a reckless people when we are at our best. We are a determined but not a willful people when we are at our best. We are an energetic but not a frenetic people when we are at our best. We are a creative but not a chaotic people when we are at our best. We are a concerned but not a sentimentalist people when we are at our best. We are a realistic but not a narrow-minded people when we are at our best. Banning ill- considered, harmful ventures in human cloning will show us at our best. It will demonstrate that the untrammeled profit motive behind runaway and reckless, by contrast to responsible and controlled, developments in the area of genetics will not be given full sway, no matter how many powerful interests may be involved. It will show that the representatives of the American people are not intereste ' d in pushing us into a post-human future dominated by what President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic has called the "arrogant anthropocentrism" that so ravaged the previous century. It will say that we will not turn our children into objects and products of manufacture and design. It will say that we have said no to the threat of a damaging biogenetic homogenization or uniformity of the sort that cloning portends. It will say that we will not permit the emergence of unused 'products', failed clonees, poor misbegotten 'children' of our distorted imaginations. It will say that we are determined to protect and to sustain what we know to be the best contexts for child nurture-a child who is not a product but a precious and unique human being, a child who has not been deprived of a unique identity through the terms of its production but precisely given a unique identity through the terms of its begetting.

There are those who tell us that banning this harmful procedure is an unacceptable diminution of human freedom. I do not understand the view of freedom they promote. Responsible freedom has never been a notion that we should simply move full steam ahead on whatever strikes our fancy or seems doable or promises profit and glory and newspaper headlines. Freedom is always limited by my presence among others. Rights are never absolute because we are not. Those who claim that to prevent human cloning cuts into an unlimited right to 'reproductive freedom' ignore politics, ethics, and history. All decent societies restrict this freedom and set boundaries to its operation. Banning human cloning would not, in this sense, be unprecedented but well within our established traditions. Authentic freedom and responsibility should never be reliquished in favor of an abstract, ideological claim that feeds and fuels narcissitic imaginings of radical sameness, for one can see in the arguments of those who express enthusiasm for cloning a real fear of the different and the unpredictable, a yearning for a world of guaranteed self-replication. At base such a world flies in the face of everything we know about the importance of bio- diversity and of social and political pluralism. I urge you to pass HR 1644, a bill consistent with our traditions and our sense of who we are as a people when we are at our very best.



LOAD-DATE: June 20, 2001