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Dr Donald Bruce, Society Religion & Technology Project, Church of Scotland
The proposal by an Italian scientist to attempt to produce clones human babies would be the height of irresponsibility were it allowed to take place. It gives science a bad name. It goes against established legal, ethical and medical understanding.
The practice has already been outlawed by the European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine, covering not just the EU but all European states. The fact that the scientists is having to go "offshore" is testimony to the degree to which the practice is regarded as professionally, medically and ethically unacceptable.s
Ethically there is a widespread international understanding that to clone a human being is wrong. To clone is to exercise an unprecedented control over someone else's complete genetic makeup. It is quite different from the randomness of identical twinning, where an embryo of unique and so far unknown genetic type spontaneously divides. Cloning takes the genetic material of an existing person and uses it as the basis of a new person. This does not mean an identical person, of course. All the other aspects we call "environmental" factors will be different. For the first time a person would come into the world who had had their genes preordained by someone else. We argue that this is intrinsically wrong. We can reject our upbringing, education and social influences, but we cannot change our genes.
Equally important, it would be unthinkable in terms of medical risk. In 1998 the Farm Animal Welfare Council of the UK Ministry of Agriculture called for a moratorium on commercial uses of animal cloning, because of the serious welfare problems encountered when several animal species have been cloned. In such a context it would be criminally irresponsible to attempt a technique on humans which is known frequently to cause deformities, large foetuses and premature deaths in sheep and cattle. This departs from any medical justification.
Childlessness afflicts many couples, my wife and I included. Technologies like IVF have given many possibilities for helping the situation. But there are limits on how far the desire to be a parent justifies grabbing any form of technology in order to meet our desires. A good life is still possible without children, after all. As things currently stand the chances for any cople contemplating offering themselves would be more likely to produce deformed babies, miscarriages and early deaths than a healthy baby. No desire for a child is worth such terrible odds.
Dr Bruce is Director of the Church of Scotland Society Religion and Technology Project, assessing ethical issues in technology for Scotland's national church. He has been involved with the ethics of cloning since 1996 and is a leading authority on the subject. He is co-editor of the book "Engineering Genesis".
For more, see our extensive pages on Cloning, including our Discussion Paper on the controversial issues of Stem Cells and Therapeutic Uses of Cloning.]
This article first appeared on 9 March 2001 on SRT's Article on BBC On-line Website
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