Size is no criterion in life matters

Live-birth cloning is clearly wrong ­ but it's also wrong to create a clone for its stem cells, says David van Gend. This article first appeared in the Canberra Times, 23 February, 2004.

Size matters to cloners and their supporters. Disparaging the human embryo as "almost invisible to the eye", a mere "speck of dust" and therefore of no moral weight, tells us something about the disparager's vision but nothing about the meaning of the embryo.

In an uncivil and unscientific tirade against "Bible brandishers" trying to "thwart" human cloning (CT February 16, p11), Johann Hari joins all the IVF scientists who want to downgrade the embryonic human into mere raw material for research, free to be cloned or cut up, sneering in unison that the embryo is "smaller than a full stop".

When physicists study the embryonic universe it is a matter of intellectual wonder that so tiny an entity could express itself into so vast and fruitful a cosmos. Other scientists studying the embryonic human should feel the same wonder. For the human embryo in its complexity and energy is a universe in miniature, an entire world exploding outwards from the Big Bang of conception.

The ignorant eye sees only a speck of dust; the knowing eye sees a self-contained world vibrantly alive, whose meaning cannot be weighed in grams or trivialised for being tiny. Its meaning lies in the fact of its having a human identity, a genetic name that is spelt out at conception and takes a lifetime to be fully expressed. It is a new character scripted into our common story, a fellow traveller whom we must cherish.

So this is an appeal for an intelligent and respectful perspective on tiny human beings, natural, IVF or even cloned, not propagandist put-downs about the embryo being a "speck of dust". Smallness can be an illusion of perspective, leaving us ignorant of the good things contained in smallness.

The great divide over embryo experimentation and cloning has been between those who think these smallest human lives matter, and those who think they do not.

It is significant that, in the words of a Senate Report into cloning: "There is in fact little disagreement that the embryo is a human life and that its life commences at fertilisation."

On that we agree: an embryo is a human life. The disagreement is over when that life begins to "matter". According to some, a human life today needs a certain quantity of certain qualities, before grudging it full admission to the human family. "Sentience and the capacity to feel pain are better ways to register full life than raw conception". hari writes, thus granting humanity to the 18 week fetus.

Set against such a conclusion is the traditional faith, held by many ordinary people, that an embryo matters from the start for the same reason any of us matter: we belong to the one human family under the one Father, and even the embryo is known and loved by Him.

This illustrates what Hari calls "the fundamental disagreement about the most basic question of all: what human life is". That will remain at the heart of the disagreement over how human life may be created, whether it must be in the humane context of a mother and father conceiving a child, or whether asexual cloning is to be permitted, where there is no real mother or father.

For a clone can be made from a lump of anonymous human meat in the hospital freezer, an artefact of the laboratory with no parent to protect it from exploitation. Or if a clone is made from the cell of a known adult, that adult is not a true parent: a clone is the donor's identical twin, not their child, so a woman who gives birth to her clone is not the child's mother, but her twin sister. That clone would be the first utter orphan in the human race, with no possibility of a father or mother or place within normal human kinship.

Live-birth cloning is obviously wrong. But it is also wrong to create and kill a younger clone for its stem cells.

For a while there will be general condemnation about live-birth cloning. But at some stage our culture's Word of Power will be uttered in the context of cloning: "choice", especially reproductive choice, and the condemnation will falter.

Lesbian partners wanting their own baby, parents wanting to replicate a dead child, weird cults, will demand their right to choose cloning.

Then, for a culture which in the name of "choice" has so violated the central moral bond between parents and their offspring, starting with the culling of social abortion and working backwards to the cannibalising of useful embryos, what chance will there be of maintaining resistance to this newest dehumanising "choice" of cloning?

(Dr David van Gend is a spokesman for Do No Harm, an association promoting adult stem cell research but opposing cloning.)