Human Cloning
Excerpt from More Than Human:
Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement

The most widely feared and denounced genetic technology is reproductive cloning – the production of a human baby with genes copied from another person.  Researchers have cloned sheep, cows, and monkeys, and dubious claims have been made that humans have been cloned.  Whether that’s happened yet or not, the fundamental technology exists, and the claims have roused public fears. 

Cloning has been almost uniformly denounced as morally repugnant.  Leon Kass, chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics (PCBE), describes human cloning as a threat to “the dignity of human procreation” and a “first step toward a eugenic world in which children become objects of manipulation and products of will.”  Virtually every political leader in every country is publicly opposed to cloned babies. More than 100 countries at the UN support a ban on reproductive cloning, though the ban has not yet passed due to disagreement over whether therapeutic cloning, which produces medically useful stem cells but no children, should also be banned.

There are certain cases where reproductive cloning is the best or only way to have a biologically related child.  For example, consider a couple in which neither the man’s sperm nor the woman’s eggs are viable.  Neither IVF nor egg donors nor sperm donors nor surrogate mothers could help this couple.  Cloning, on the other hand, could give them a child that shared the genes of one of the parents.

Same-sex couples are another case where cloning makes biological sense.  Without cloning a lesbian couple could use a sperm donor to conceive, and a gay male couple could find a willing surrogate mom and egg donor.   Both of these solutions, though, result in a child with only half of the genes of one of the parents in the couple.  And both solutions involve a third party who’s now biologically related to the child and may produce unwanted entanglements.  A clone, on the other hand, is related only to one member of the couple.  Especially for lesbian couples (who don’t need the services of a surrogate mother), this may be the best option for having a biologically related child.

Reproductive cloning isn’t safe today.  Cloned animals are often born with deformities or health problems.  So long as that’s the case, it’s unethical to attempt it with a human.  The technique can and should be illegal until basic research on animals makes us confident that it will work safely in humans.  However, the anti-cloning movement isn’t primarily concerned with safety.  It’s concerned with humanity and identity, and the notion that giving birth to cloned humans would somehow rob them – or the rest of us – of some unique human dignity.

The debate about reproductive cloning is often marred by a misunderstanding of what it means to clone someone.  In popular parlance, clone is shorthand for “copy”.  Imagine a clone of yourself.  What do you see?  You may be picturing someone about your age, who looks just like you, with your same beliefs and attitudes, perhaps even your same skills and knowledge of the world.  But this would not be your clone. 

In fact, there are 40 million human clones alive today.  We call them identical twins.  We recognize them as individuals without a second thought. We have no angst about whether a twin is less of a person than a singleton. We have no doubt that each twin has a soul, at least in so far as the rest of us have souls.

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