The clone wars are coming, and no, I don't mean to theaters this summer. After lying dormant for several months since the House of Representatives passed a bill that would prevent the use of cloning for both reproductive and therapeutic purposes, the cloning debate is about to heat up again as the Senate prepares to entertain its own version of the bill. In preparation for this debate, President Bush has begun the festivities by putting his foot where it belongs: in his mouth.
To Bush and to many conservatives, the cloning of a human embryo for any purpose is unethical; but to many people, including what may prove to be a majority of senators, cloning for medical purposes and cloning to produce people are very different things. Bush's recent speeches have glossed over any difference that Americans may see by pushing a unilateral stance that cloning is evil, talking of inane, scary consequences, such as "a society in which human beings are grown for spare body parts and children are engineered to custom specifications."
I don't presume to say that Bush and anyone else who believes that cloning an embryo is unethical is inherently wrong, merely that the ethics of cloning are not sufficiently agreed upon to merit such hard-line legislation as the President wants. Furthermore, it is way too much of a leap to combine the cloning of cells and the cloning of entire human beings into one issue, as Bush is attempting to do with his blanket statements about protecting "human dignity" and "human life." Whether or not we should use cloning to create new people is an ethical question entirely distinct from whether or not we should make and destroy human embryos.
Me, I get real skeptical any time someone starts talking about "human life," and even more so when that person is either ignorant of the scientific facts or relies on much of his audience being ignorant of the scientific facts that pertain to the issue. That whole thing about growing human beings for "spare body parts" is, either idiotically or intentionally, inaccurate at describing the process of generating specific human organs from stem cells. Put it this way: when a human being is conceived (rather than created, hence acknowledging that it is not a complete person), the original embryonic cells divide and differentiate, ceasing to exist as they previously had. The only thing that would happen differently in many needed instances of therapeutic cloning is that only a single organ would be produced, while the remainder of a body would not.
This doesn't solve the question, but it takes us closer to the heart of it. Bush clearly knows that the only life sacrificed in the process would be a few embryonic cells, but he also knows how to characterize something as an impossible worst-case scenario, as if once we allow cloning of this nature, all human life will become negotiable. Fortunately, the line is not so hard to draw.
Whereas the abortion issue deals with fetuses that are developing intelligence and the ability to sustain their own life, therapeutic cloning needs nothing more than life at the cellular level. All we need to ask is if an embryo that functions as simple cellular life counts as human. Scientifically, the only thing that makes it human is its DNA, which you would also find in a culture of human skin growing in a dish. Then comes the whole argument about the potential to become a human life, which some say makes an embryo a human life. This one just kills me, because in order to become something you have to start out as something else.
There are a few worse arguments, such as that embryos of a certain age are shaped like people, with a formed head and a tail? There are a lot of similar attempts to argue from the basis of science, all flawed. The question we're really trying to answer is "when does a human become more than the sum of its parts?" The only way to argue this is from personal belief.
As I have said in the past, I don't believe in a miraculous moment when one thing becomes another; rather, I believe that the process of becoming must be a gradual one, lasting from conception into adulthood. "Becoming" is more natural to us than "being," since even grown our bodies are always changing, losing old cells and replacing them, growing and aging.
There's an old joke about when a Jewish mother thinks it's too late for an abortion: when her son gets to medical school. Well, maybe that's a little extreme, but in a way, it illustrates how ridiculous Bush is for worrying that if we don't draw a definite line, we'll lose any ability to determine what human life is to protect it. If you ask me, the decision is a very subjective one. We each have different ideas on what makes a human being. Some say it takes the capacity for conscious thought, others believe in a soul that is given at conception. I say its wrong to define ethics for the whole by accepting the most restrictive views as the most pious.
I don't want everyone to share my beliefs on the subject either. Just because I don't believe an embryo has more intrinsic worth than an amoeba does not mean that no one should think otherwise. But we must acknowledge that these decisions are based on faith and subjective reasoning in addition to science, so we must not be denied the ability to decide as individuals. It is a matter of conscience too close to define by a federal law, and thus should be left for us to decide for ourselves as patients, doctors and researchers.
