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 here's
an old saw about a man whose wife comes home unexpectedly and finds
him in bed with his naked mistress. "Who is that woman?"
the outraged wife demands. The man, a surprised and innocent look
on his face, says: "Woman? What woman?"
Cloning apologists
remind me of that philandering husband. Their opponents point out
that a cloned human embryo is a human life, and the cloners reply
with: "Human life? What human life?"
Unfortunately,
it seems to be working, as the media and nervous politicians continue
parroting the line that a human-clone embryo is not really human.
The biotech
industry has nothing to lose and everything to gain from this. Hoping
to make vast fortunes from patented "products" derived
from the destruction of embryonic life, Big Biotech is counting
on being able to create an unlimited supply of human clones. Their
problem: The American people believe there is something inherently
valuable about human life. Cloning sheep and other animals is one
thing — but cloning humans, that's different.
The House of
Representatives has already passed a strong ban. President Bush
strongly supports outlawing human cloning and is guaranteed to sign
legislation as soon as it reaches his desk. The only task remaining
before cloning humans becomes illegal is passage of the ban by the
United States Senate.
Pushed into
a corner, pro-cloners responded by mounting an intense public-relations
and lobbying campaign aimed at thwarting passage of S-790, the Senate
counterpart to the House anti-cloning bill. The cloners' approach:
Agree to outlaw "reproductive" cloning (that is, implanting
a clone into a womb for purposes of gestation and birth) —
but allow so-called "therapeutic" cloning (cloning used
for research, that culminates in the death of the clone) to proceed
unhindered.
But such a
policy would open the door to the unlimited cloning of human life
— because the act of cloning does not occur at birth. A clone
is created when the nucleus is removed from a human egg and implanted
with genetic material taken from the person being cloned. The egg
is then stimulated and reacts as if it had been fertilized. Once
this occurs, the act of cloning is complete. After that, it's
only a matter of what's done to the human life that has been created:
research which destroys it (therapeutic cloning) or implantation
in a womb (reproductive cloning).
And here's
where the cloning advocates get disingenuous. In order to allay
Americans' disgust toward human cloning, Big Biotech argues that
a human embryo created by cloning isn't really a human life. Embryology
textbooks, however, will beg to differ. The science of the matter
is that once embryonic development commences, a separate and distinct
human life exits. For the first eight weeks of its life, it is known
as an embryo. Thereafter, until birth, it is called a fetus.
In either category,
the developing life is an individual, self-contained form of human
life with its own genetic makeup and gender. Given sufficient time,
healthy genes, and the right environment in which to gestate, it
will result in the birth of a human baby. But — whether or
not the embryo is ever born — scientifically, it is a human
life from the beginning of its existence as a distinct organism.
But that truth
hinders the cloning agenda. So, advocates have mounted a campaign
to redefine words. The following are just a few of their rhetorical
gambits.
The myth
of the "pre-embryo". One of the most pervasive arguments
made by promoters of human cloning — as well as those defending
embryonic stem cell research (ESCR) — is that embryos younger
than two weeks' development are really "pre-embryos."
There's just one problem with that assertion: There is no such thing
as a pre-embryo.
Don't take
my word for it. Princeton biologist and cloning enthusiast Lee M.
Silver admitted in
Remaking Eden that the term pre-embryo has "been
embraced wholeheartedly… for reasons that are political, not
scientific." He further states that the term "is useful
in the political arena — where decisions are made about whether
to allow early embryo (now pre-embryo) experimentation…"
Or we can turn to basic embryology. The authors of the textbook
Human Embryology & Teratology have refused to recognize
the existence of a "pre-embryo" because: (1) it is ill-defined;
(2) it is inaccurate; (3) it is unjustified, because the accepted
meaning of the word embryo includes all of the first 8 weeks; (4)
it is equivocal, because it may convey the erroneous idea that a
new human organism is formed at only some considerable time after
fertilization; and (5) it was introduced in 1986 "largely for
public policy reasons."
The clone embryo is merely a collection of dividing cells.
A more recent attempt to strip the clone of its humanity claims
that the embryo clone is nothing more than dividing somatic cells
that are no different, in kind or nature, than the cells you lose
every day in your shower. Pro-cloner Alan Russell, executive director
of the Pittsburgh Tissue Engineering Initiative, wrote in a recent
opinion column in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
All cells
contain DNA, which gives them the ability to reproduce. But cloners
have discovered that if one removes the DNA from mom's egg cell
(producing an empty cell) and replaces it with her daughter's
DNA, the newly produced cell can survive…
We then have
in our hands a fresh cell which from now on will look like her
daughter's cell… In a dish, technology will exist to take
that cell and simply convince it to multiply — clone itself…
The process is called cloning because the new cell created in
the laboratory has the ability to copy itself again and again
before turning itself into the liver cell that your loved one
so desperately needs.
If there were
an Academy Award for disingenuousness in advocacy, Russell would
be a shoe-in. First, the entity is not called a clone because its
cells divide. If that were true, all cells would be clones —
since all cells replace themselves through cellular division.
Second, a clone
is so named because the cloned entity is virtually identical, genetically,
to the provider of the genetic material used to replace the nucleus
of the egg. (I say "virtually" because a minute amount
of genetic material from the egg becomes part of the genetic makeup
of the new cloned entity.)
Third, while
it's true that replacing the egg nucleus with the DNA of the cloned
person is the primary technique used to clone in the laboratory,
this genetic transfer is not all that happens. As stated earlier,
the cloner must next stimulate the genetically modified egg to grow
in the same fashion as it would had it been fertilized. Thus, just
as Dolly the cloned sheep is not its mother, so a cloned human embryo
is not merely a somatic cell line derived from the person who was
cloned; it is a separate and distinct living entity.
Finally, the
"new cell" does not "copy itself again and again"
until, as if by magic, it suddenly becomes various body tissues.
Rather, if the cloned embryo survived long enough he or she would
go through exactly the same stages of development as any other baby
— from an embryo, to a fetus, to birth. Indeed, as the clone
embryo nears two weeks' development, its makeup has changed dramatically
from what existed at the single-cell stage. Like its naturally created
counterpart, he or she would now be made up primarily of undifferentiated
stem cells, which would, given the time to develop, become all of
the tissues of the body — such as, for instance, the liver
tissue referenced by Russell. It is these stem cells that are the
current targets of the biotech industry.
"If
it has the ability to twin, it isn't human." Some cloning
supporters claim that an embryo isn't really human life until it
can no longer become an identical twin. The idea seems to be that
until the time in embryonic development when identical twinning
cannot occur, the embryo isn't really a human individual. Since
human research clones would be destroyed prior to that time, destroying
the clone would not actually take a human life.
The argument
is ridiculous. Naturally occurring identical twins originate from
the same fertilized egg. (Fraternal twins develop from different
fertilized eggs.) Twinning occurs early in gestation when the single
embryo splits into two identical embryos — a natural form of
cloning. These identical embryos are now siblings.
Before twinning,
an embryo — whether naturally conceived or cloned — is
an individual, self-contained embryonic human life with a gender
and an individual genetic makeup. After identical twinning, there
are now two individual, self-contained human lives, each having
an identical gender and genetic makeup. In other words, there are
now two human lives instead of one. However, even though they
appear to be identical genetically, each life is unique. (For
example, should the twins ever be born, each would have different
fingerprints.)
Advocates of
the Brave New World Order know that, in the cloning debate, we confront
the most fundamental issue possible: Does individual human life
have inherent value simply and merely because it is human? They
also know that if the answer is yes, we will ban human cloning as
an immoral and unethical objectification of human life.
(This would
not mean abandoning medical research into the potential of human
cellular therapies. To the contrary, by dropping our pursuit of
cloning and ESCR, all our resources and energies could be aggressively
applied to pursuing adult/alternative stem-cell therapies that offer
the potential benefits of ESCR — without degrading the value
of some human life to that of cattle herds or timber forests.)
But if Big
Biotech and its apologists are able to convince the public that
the answer is no — if they succeed in excluding embryos from
our common humanity in order to justify harvesting their parts —
the value of human life itself will be transformed from an
objective good into a matter of mere opinion. That, in turn, would
lead us to create subjective criteria by which to judge which humans
have lives that are sacrosanct, and which do not.
And, it turns
out, this is exactly what the modern bioethics movement is already
doing. According to "personhood theory," being a part
of the human community is not what matters. What counts is being
part of the "moral community." Those who belong are "persons,"
a status gained — whether by a human or an animal — by
possessing certain cognitive abilities, such as being self-aware
over time. Those who do not belong are "non persons,"
humans (and other life forms) that have insufficient ability to
reason, and that therefore have lives of significantly less moral
concern.
The humans
generally cast into the outer darkness of non-personhood include
all unborn life (whether created by cloning or by fertilization);
newborn infants; people with advanced dementia; and those in persistent
coma, or who have other significant cognitive disabilities. Not
only do these humans not possess the right to life, they may not
have the right to bodily integrity. Indeed, it has been argued in
the world's most respected medical and bioethics journals that the
body parts of non persons — whether organs, corneas, or embryonic
stem cells — should be available to harvest for the benefit
of persons. In this sense, the debate over cloning and ESCR is merely
one battlefield of a much larger war.
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