Cloning Concerns

If a bizarre religious cult is to be believed, the stuff of science fiction has become fact. The Raelians, who believe life on earth was established by aliens from other planets, claim that two babies have been produced by cloning just after Christmas. If these first two prove to be false calls, eventually a human clone will be produced. But should they? Cloning raises a number of questions.

A major issue is that of safety. Many people applaud the success of Dolly the sheep. Yet it took 276 failed attempts before Dolly finally made it on the scene. That is a 0.36 per cent success rate. How many embryos will be lost, and how much fetal wastage will occur before we arrive at an acceptable success rate for human cloning?

Also, cloning in the past has led to a high amount of mutations and other problems, such as ageing problems and the transmission of rare genetic diseases. Recently, a review of all the world's cloned animals suggests that every animal clone thus far produced is genetically and physically defective. This is not safe science.

But on a more fundamental level, what of questions about human relationships and identity? One of the fundamental ethical principles of medicine is to respect the autonomy of the individual. Yet the autonomy and rights of the cloned person get off to a bad start from the very beginning. Indeed, how will the clone and the original relate to each other, and be treated by friends and loved ones?

And what exactly is a clone? Is he or she a child or a sibling to the donor? Will it be the donor's to do as he/she pleases? Is the clone just property of the donor, or of the scientific community that brought it into existence? How will knowledge of a clone's beginnings affect the clone?

Many argue that cloning is justified to ease the pain of parents with a dying child. But this reduces the child to an object, a commodity. Indeed, the issue of cloning raises the question of designer children - creating children specially designed for the purposes and uses of others. We will be genetically engineering people without their consent.

The institution of marriage, already straining to the point of breaking, will further be assaulted with cloning. Same-sex unions, IVP, surrogacy and other attempts to redefine families have already altered the social landscape. One of the main reasons for marriage in the past was conception and raising of children. Cloning undermines all such rationale for marriage.

We have already opened the door too far with the new reproductive technologies. The Brave New World implications of human cloning should be all too apparent.

Family Update, January-February 2003, p. 8