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USA must move immediately to Ban Reproductive Cloning
27 December 2002 - Immediate release
Dr Donald Bruce,Society Religion & Technology Project, Church of Scotland
Contact tel. 0131-240 2250, Fax 0131-240 2239, srtp@srtp.org.uk http://www.srtp/org.uk
or Church of Scotland Press Office 0131- 240 2243
"I consider that in trying to clone humans the Raelian groups are taking unacceptable risks with human beings and acting unethically," says Dr Donald Bruce, Director of the Church of Scotland's Society Religion & Technology Project, "But claims made by Clonaid that a cloned baby girl has been born must be treated as sceptical without proper confirmation." SRT Link to BBC On-Line report 27 December 2002
The Church of Scotland is a leading international authority on the ethical issues of cloning, through close contacts with animal cloning researchers since 1994. In May 1997 it was one of the first organisations in the world to make a formal declaration against reproductive human cloning.
It is intrinsically wrong to produce a human being with the same genetic make up as an existing person. People ought to have the right to a genetic composition that is their own. It is also wrong to give other people the power to select the complete genetic make up of someone yet to be born. This is quite different from having "identical" twins. That is a random event. No one chose the embryo to divide. No one had that particular genetic make up before them.
Reproductive cloning also involves unacceptably serious risks in humans, based on the widespread experience of attempts to perform cloning in animals, which lead to more abnormal pregnancies, deformities and deaths soon after birth than it does healthy offspring. There are serious psychological and relationship risks in the notion of producing children that are the genetic copies of either parent or sibling, bit in a different generation.
It is also disturbing if people are seeking, as is claimed, to recreate a lost child through cloning. This is an illusion, because any child so born would not be a new and different individual. They would need to be loved for themselves, as themselves, and not be seen as a means of coping with a tragic bereavement. If the claim turns out to be true, however, the Church of Scotland urges that any cloned child should not be stigmatised as abnormal, but treated with the same love and respect as any other.
"This should not be seen as a precedent to proceed with cloning more generally - quite the opposite, it is urgent reason to pass the proposed legislation at the United Nations, proposed by the French and German governments, to ban reproductive cloning worldwide, and which is currently resisted by the USA," says Dr Bruce "There is now an urgent need for the USA to step into line with the international consensus and bring forward immediate national legislation, as the UK did a year ago, to ban reproductive cloning in its private as well as public sectors." In September, Dr Bruce spoke to UN delegates in New York in support of the French-German proposal. Kirk calls on United Nations to ban Reproductive Cloning
"As to cloning making humans immortal, that is simply ridiculous. Eternally life is not achieved by technology but faith in Jesus Christ," concludes Dr Bruce.
Background
To clone is to exercise an unprecedented and unacceptable 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. Instead of having their own unique genetic make-up, they would have someone else's "hand-me-down" genes.
This does not mean an identical person, of course. All the other aspects we call "environmental" factors will be different. But 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. The Church of Scotland, along with many others, considers that cloning human beings should be outlawed worldwide.
Tel: 0131-240 2250, Fax 0131-240 2239
Email: srtp@srtp.org.uk http://www.srtp.org.uk
or Church of Scotland Press Office 0131- 240 2243
Dr Bruce is Director of the Society Religion and Technology Project of the Church of Scotland, assessing ethical issues in technology for Scotland's national church. He chaired an expert working group on the ethics of genetic engineering in animals and plants, which produced the acclaimed book "Engineering Genesis", which examined the ethics of both xenotransplantation and animal cloning.
