The anthrax attacks are a case of science run amuck with the aim of killing people. Cloning is a case of science run amuck with the aim of — who really knows what? The common denominator in both cases is “science run amuck.”
I am not a Luddite and this is not an anti-science screed. I have at least as much appreciation for the achievements of science and technology as anybody else — indeed, I may have more than some secularists do, since, as a religious believer, I understand that science and technology are human participations in the creative activity of God. But when it comes to human cloning, the only responsible reaction is a flat, unequivocal no.
Publicity-hungry scientists at a Worcester, Mass., firm called Advanced Cell Technology, who claim to have produced the first human embryos by cloning (a claim others dispute on technical grounds), say their goal — far down the line — is to bring all sorts of benefits to the human race.
The promised benefits of human cloning are supposed to trump everything else. So it is reasonable to ask: What benefits are these? The New York Times, defending the Worcester experiments, cited a report by a National Academy of Sciences panel calling cloning an “attractive option” in the search for ways to prevent the body from rejecting stem cells inserted for therapeutic purposes.
“Some day researchers may find another way to overcome the rejection problem,” the newspaper conceded. “But that is a gamble.” As the Times certainly knows, human cloning also is, technically speaking, a huge gamble. Somehow the newspaper neglected to mention that.
Defenders of cloning make what they deem a morally meaningful distinction between “therapeutic” cloning and “reproductive” cloning. Cloning of the first kind, meant to facilitate the quest for cures for disease, involves producing a clone for experimental purposes but destroying it instead of implanting it in a womb. Cloning of the second kind would seek to bring the clone to birth.
Therapeutic cloning is good, we are routinely told, while reproductive cloning is bad. The implication is that experiments like those in Worcester should be allowed to proceed.
Morally speaking, this misses the point. Quite as much as reproductive cloning, therapeutic cloning involves dehumanizing and mechanizing the process of human reproduction and treating its product as just that — a “product” — to be used for experimentation and then disposed of. The name for that is evil — not hypothetical evil at some point in the future, but concrete evil here and now.
It also appears that the therapeutic/reproductive distinction currently trumpeted by cloning defenders is merely a ploy, meant to be set aside once therapeutic cloning is in the bag and it’s time to start pressing for cloning of the “reproductive” kind. A Dec. 2 Times story by Sheryl Gay Stolberg confirms as much. In other contexts, this is called bait-and-switch.
Sen. Tom Daschle (D-SD), Senate majority leader, has made it clear the Senate will stall on a cloning ban passed by the House last July, 265-162. “A lot of senators want time to think through all the medical and scientific issues involved,” a spokesman explained. The effort will be made to substitute a ban on only “reproductive” cloning for a total ban. Here’s hoping it fails.
(This article courtesy of the Arlington Catholic Herald.)
