A Pragmatic Approach to Human Cloning: Distinguishing Legitimate from Illegitimate Cases, Study notes of Chinese Culture

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An Argument for Limited Human Cloning

The news from the sheepyards of Scotland of Dolly’s creation has reinvigorated the cloning debate.i^ For the first time a clone, a genetic duplicate, was made from an adult somatic cell. Until this experiment of Wilmut and his colleagues, it was commonly held that the genetic matter of an adult differentiated somatic cell could not be reactivated so to allow for the development to term of a viable mammal. Wilmut’s technical success means that the prospect of cloning an adult human being is no longer just idle speculation. It is now a real pressing moral issue. Most discussions of Cloning tend to dwell on the most awful imaginable scenarios rather than the more attractive ones. Admittedly, it is a lot easier to imagine the former than the latter. Dan Brock probably speaks for the majority when he says “I believe it is reasonable to conclude at this time that human cloning doesn’t seem to promise great benefits or meet great human needs.”ii However, I disagree with this assessment because there seem to be cases in which the human needs are quite compelling and, as a result of this, it would be quite callous to deny certain infertile couples the option of cloning. In addition, I believe a rather useful principle can be found for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate cases of cloning. After surveying the different types of cases, I will present this principle as a guideline for legislative and institutional policy. My hope is that this guideline will be received by most of the opponents of cloning as a welcome compromise because it rules out the more repugnant cases while allowing the few that are more appealing. We do not have to accept Leon Kass’ claim that “the only safe trench we can dig across the slippery slope ...is to insist upon the inviolable distinction between animal and human cloning.”iii^ The opponents of cloning can also take some consolation in the fact that a principled line in the sand has been drawn, one not based on just the “yuk factor,” its more sophisticated cousin “the wisdom of repugnance,” iv^ or a dubious adherence to doing only what is “natural,” the latter stance

Any cloned children raised by such narcissists will probably be given little room to develop in ways that do not mirror their creator’s self image.vi^ Its also likely that they would not be loved for the right reasons. The love narcissists have for their children is more the expression of self love than the admirable love that reaches out to someone different and loves them despite of or even for their differences. The arrogant beliefs of narcissists that a world with more people like them is a better world revives our old fears of eugenics. Few people are receptive to plans to clone the best and the brightest because they are the best and the brightest. Perhaps an even scarier development is the selling of genomes. Someone could buy in a legal market the genes of a Lucianno Pavarrotti or Michael Jordan or Albert Einstein if these celebrities or their legal heirs so consented. And those of us who have watched perhaps too much television or read too many science fiction books are quick to imagine the illicit cloning of unwitting people. These “drive-by clonings”vii^ would be done with cells that the talented had unwittingly “shed” during the ordinary course of their life. These talented people would be ignorant of those who were financially profiting or otherwise benefitting from their genetic material. And as disturbing as a genetic market would be, a more frightening form of commodification would be organ farming. This nightmare would involve people making clones of themselves in order to be supplied someday with desperately needed organs.viii^ Even if such organ farming did not cause the death of the organ source, such a solely instrumental use of a human being is loathsome. Less farfetched but still disconcerting would be the sexism that could be furthered by cloning technology. Cultures or isolated individuals that favor male offspring would have the means to do so in a manner which would not only send the wrong message about a woman’s worth, but it could

eventually skew the population, drastically reducing the proportion of marriageable women. Another undesirable type of cloning would involve the perverse or, at best, confused attempt of obtaining an immortality of sorts by cloning oneself. While we do talk about living on through our children, it is just metaphorical. Producing identical clones rather than biological children does not render this metaphorical sense of immortality a literal one. Perhaps as twisted or irrational would be the belief that one could replace a lost loved one with a clone. Abandoned lovers, widowed lovers and those who suffer from unrequited love, may in their desperation, try to recreate the objects of their desires. Even if they are not deluding themselves about the identity of these substitute objects of affection, such a practice is still pathetic and distasteful. Many of the opponents of cloning are repulsed by the the prospect of children being created and raised by siblings rather than their true genetic parents. The bioethicist James Nelson imagines clones seeking out their genetic parents and pursuing a child-parent relationship despite the fact that the child’s origins are the result of their older siblings’ doing and not the parents who perhaps didn’t want any more children.ix^ It would be very unfair to place the genetic parent in such a situation. And it would be awful for the cloned child who seeks out but is not welcomed by such a parent. Along similar lines, Leon Kass writes of how cloning will disrupt traditional roles and duties: In the case of self-cloning, the “offspring” is, in addition, one’s twin; and so the dreaded result of incest - to be parent of one’s sibling - is here brought aboutdeliberately, albeit without any acts of coitus. Moreover, all other relationships will be confounded. What will father, grandfather, aunt, cousin, sister mean? Who will bear what ties and what burdens? What sort of social identity will someone have with one whole side - “father’s” or “mother’s” necessarily excluded? It is no answer to saythat our society, with its high incidence of divorce, remarriage, adoption, extramarital childbearing and the rest, already confounds lineage and confuses kinship and responsibility for children (and everyone else), unless one also wants to argue that this is, for children, a preferable state of affairs.x

numbers are not large, the suffering of those few in such predicaments warrant a sympathetic societal response. However, if such infertile parents were allowed to clone their lost child, this would lessen their grief. And if the child had yet to reach what was deemed a mature age, his consent would not be required. But if the deceased child had reached such an age, then perhaps his consent would have to have been acquired through some process analogous to that for organ donation. Where there is not a record of the mature child’s view on his posthumous cloning by his parents, maybe the default position should be the parents can choose to clone their deceased child. In any event, the details need not be worked out here. Less likely to occur than the premature death of an only child, but still compelling, would be a case where an ill child a bone marrow transplant. I am just going to assume that the reader wouldn’t think it wrong for the parents to conceive another child through normal sexual procreation in order to save the afflicted one, as long as the parents would also love and cherish this additional child. Now suppose that the parents were infertile because of advanced age or some form of abnormality, such that cloning the ill child would in the absence of an available donor be their only recourse.xiii^ And even if the couple is fertile, the chances of a genetic tissue match makes cloning the preferable option. Cloning also appears as a sympathetic solution to a third scenario. This involves parents who are at a high risk for passing on a deadly or debilitating disease. Imagine that before they become aware of this, they conceived a child who fortunately wins the genetic lottery, beating the odds by being born healthy. Another possibility is that they are likely to pass on a disease like hemophilia to male offprsing and thus would like to clone their only daughter. Should this family be condemned to a Chinese-style communist one child family? This hardly seems fair. Most Americans desire, even

feel entitled to at least a two-child family. Cloning would permit the family plagued by unwelcome genes to still reach an acceptable sized family. There is a fourth scenario, which is basically a combination of the first and third. This would involve a couple, who after having one child, lose the capacity to produce viable eggs or sperm, yet wants to enlarge their family. Allowing them to clone their only child will enable them to have another child to whom they are both genetically related - which would not be the case with a gamete donor or adoption. I hope that the reader is sympathetic to the plight of those in the four types of cases just surveyed. What is it that these cases have in common that the earlier repugnant cases lacked? The four positive cases all mirror normal procreation. That is, a new child is being deliberately created and brought into the world by the decision of two willing partners (the parents), from each of whom the child gets half of his or her DNA. Both normal sexual procreation and the advocated form of cloning meet this criterion.xiv^ The four types of cases of preferred cloning only differ from normal sexual procreation in that the parents make the decision to reuse the DNA they earlier decided to fuse in order to create the first child. But none of the repugnant cases involves the cloning decision being made by the parents of the clone or, if they do, the parents’ practice is distasteful for adults other than the genetic parents of the being cloned are taking possession of the clone, perhaps because they purchased the genetic material from which the clone emerges. What also distinguishes the two categories of cloning is that the favored form involves infertility or, at least, the inability to have healthy babies.xv^ We are sympathetic to those who want to do what the vast majority of other couples do: combine their genetic material with a loved one and create a new life. So our short survey suggests some necessary conditions for cloning: 1) people should not be

their resulting sibling(s).xvii^ Not only could people be made into parents without their choosing to become so, but they may not even be aware that they have become parents.

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So we have seen what property all the distasteful cases lack. But this does not rule out that many of the disagreeable attributes of the repugnant cases are shared by our three more attractive types of scenarios. Fortunately, this is not the case - or, at least, the distasteful features in question are not shared to the same extent by the endorsed types of cases. So we will be able to disarm the opponents of cloning by pointing out to them that their general objections to cloning either do not apply to the cases of cloning championed in this essay, or do so only to a much lesser degree than they envisioned. Many of the opponents of cloning, such as Kass, are repulsed by the prospect of children being created and raised by siblings rather than genetic parents. We have mentioned the fears of the bioethicist James Nelson who imagines clones seeking out their genetic parents and pursuing a child- parent relationship despite the fact that the child’s origins are the result of his or her older sibling’s doing and not the parents who perhaps did not want any more children.xviii^ But given the necessary conditions for cloning that I put forth, these objections are not telling. The only clones made are by infertile parents, or more accurately, those who cannot have healthy children through sexual reproduction. Thus traditional family roles, loyalties and obligations remain the same. Nor do we need to share Kass’ fear of asexual reproduction giving rise to an increase in the number of single parents as people raise their own clones. We can avoid this because the advocated principle stipulates that only the genetic parents of the possible clone can make the cloning decision. Since people would not be allowed to clone themselves, no child will be raised by a single parent

except in the case of an untimely death.xix^ And not allowing a person to decide by his or herself to clone themselves avoids not only the distasteful cases of narcissistic and arrogant cloning surveyed, but frees us from the worry that the cloned child shall be the responsibility of an older sibling who will lack the devotion to the well-being of the child that parents normally have. Frequently, those dissenting from the prospects of cloning stress the threat that cloning poses to our genetic diversity. They imagine a world where instead of combining our genes through sex and thus hedging our bets against disease, we are making ourselves more susceptible to widespread disease by not being diverse enough to always have some people who are immune to a threatening virus, bacteria, or other disease. So ironically, cloning those deemed the fittest will lead to a species that is less fit. But since the most common type of case I mentioned was essentially a scenario in which the deceased were replaced, cloning isn’t much of a threat to our diversity. Anyway, this threat is probably exagerated for if we can trust the polls, there are only a small number of people, six percent of respondents, with a favorable view towards cloning themselves.xx Like the threat to genetic diversity, the threat of gender bias is also overestimated where the recommended condition on cloning is institutionalized. This is because the permitted cases involve mostly replacement or life saving measures. Parents can’t start a family or add to it by cloning the husband, thus ensuring they will be only raising males. Nor can they clone their first child, a male, if they are fertile as a couple and able to conceive a child which may by chance turn out to be female. So although parents will have a choice whether to replace or save a child of a certain sex, they wouldn’t have the choice of what sex their initial children are. Erich and Richard Posner point out that marriage, or at least the practice of planned procreation amongst consenting adults, often prevents the least desireable from reproducing.xxi

they are the infertile members of their respective couples.xxvii^ At any rate, the harms of surrogacy are less in cases of cloning than in non-cloning cases. This is because women carrying clones merely rent their wombs rather than do this and sell their eggs. Thus neither they nor anyone else will feel that surrogacy involves them in the sale of their own flesh and blood babies. And the children of such surrogates will not feel abandoned because the respective woman who carried each of them is not his/her genetic mother. Even the sting from the charge of unnaturalness is somewhat less in the recommended cases of cloning because they involve, as we noted earlier, doing in a round about way what “normal” parents have always done. That is, both processes involve new children being created only by the consent of those who provided the genetic material forming the child’s DNA. Natural or biological family structures would not be threatened and parents would not be surprised that they have become parents again as would be the case in “drive-by clonings” or clonings initiated solely by older siblings of the resulting clone. Moreover, it is good to keep in mind that twinning is natural on most interpretations, and, genetically speaking, a clone would just be a younger twin. This may make cloning seem less of a monstrous perversion of nature. Looked at in this way, cloning does not entail any Frankenstein-like projects which usher into existence creatures unlike any with which we are presently familiar. It is just the process of creating a clone and not the product that is unfamiliar and unnatural. Although I cannot go into it here in any detail, the word “natural”is not very useful as an ethical guide. For instance, a blanket prohibiton on the unnatural would eliminate virtually all of modern lifesaving medicine. An objection related to the charge about the “unnaturalness” of new reproductive technologies was expressed in an editorial in The National Review. The editor(s) wrote: “All

creatures must be respected in themselves, rather than as things that are ‘made,’ or ‘manufactured’ to order...”xxviii^ But this phrase of the editors, “made to order” is misleading - or at least doesn’t apply to the types of cloning advocated in this paper. To make something to order suggests that we are designing children, specifiying what traits we want them to have. This would be the case if we were engaged in some kind of gene therapy or gene splicing, trying to enhance the appearance or abilities of the child we would be raising, or just cloning a child from a long list of available genomes. But the forms of cloning advocated in this paper are merely a couple’s request for another copy of something they originally accepted without being designed with any specified features. People are only asking for a second copy, whatever properties the first had. The parents I envision permitted to clone their deceased child just want a healthy, living child; its actual height, countenance, mathematical intelligence and other distinguishing traits are irrelevant. If their original child, now deceased, had been genetically different, they would still be just as happy with a healthy clone possessing these differences. The irrelevance of the details of the child is what differentiates these parents from those who only want a child made to order with certain traits such as great intelligence or athletic abilities.

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Despite my support of limited cloning, a caveat is in order. Permitting even limited cloning should be delayed until further research has taken place. The reason is that cloning technology may be dangerous. The transfer of the nucleus of adult somatic cells may make the clone more likely to suffer cancer or other diseases that appear more frequently with age.xxix^ Also, the success rate of the sheep embryos with the transplanted somatic cell nuclei appears to be far below the spontaneous abortion rate.xxx^ The rates for spontaneous abortions of clones should be brought in line with those

i.Wilmut, I., et al (1997) “Viable Offspring Derived from Fetal and Adult Mammal Cells.” Nature. 385. Pp. 810-813.

ii.Brock, Dan. “Cloning Human Beings: An Assessment of the Issues: Pro and Con.” reprinted in Clones and Clones: Facts and Fantasies about Human Cloning. Eds. Cass Sunstein and Martha Nussbaum. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1998.) p. 151.

iii. Kass, Leon R. “Why We Should Ban the Cloning of Humans: The Wisdom of Repugnance.” The New Republic. June 2, 1997.

iv.Kass claims that “repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s ability to fully articulate it...the repugnance of human cloning belongs to this category.” IBID.

v.For further distinctions between types of narcissims, and a milder form which is less objectionable, see my discussion of what I have labeled “benevolent narcissism” in my essay “The Limits of Liberal Tolerance: the Rights of Gays and Lesbians to Adopt” in The International Journal of Applied Philosophy vol 9. Winter/Spring. 1995 no. 2.

vi.As Kass rhetorically asks about parental pressure shaping the cloned child after the original: “Why else did they clone the star basketball player, mathematician and beauty queen - or even dear old dad - in the first place?” “The Wisdom of Repugnance.” Op cit.

vii. “Drive-by cloning” was a phrase coined by a U.S. News and World Report writer in the. 5/10/97 issue.

viii. The bioethicist Ruth Macklin does not see this as any more of a threat than people killing their twins for their organs. US News and World Report. March 10, 1996.

ix. IBID.

x.Kass, Leon R. “Why We Should Ban the Cloning of Humans: The Wisdom of Repugnance.” Op cit.

xi. IBID.

xii.What I mean by “infertile as couples” is that two people cannot have children with each other. It remains possible that one of the spouses (or lovers) is biologically capable of having children with someone outside of the marriage (or relationship).

xiii.Of course, this would not be an option if the cancer was likely to be genetically determined for then the cloned donor would someday be likely to face such an infliction. To save his or her life, we would be forced into a very vicious cycle of creating donor “cures” who themselves would have to be cloned to be cured.

xiv.Perhaps I should write “ideal” rather than “normal” sexual reproduction for many conceptions are due to mistakes, deceit or coercion.

xv.The prospective parents who are at a risk of passing on their genetic disease are not technically infertile, they just do not have much of a chance of having healthy children.

xvi.There may be other cases in which cloning is appealing, perhaps even justified, but not by the

relationship with them yet they, unlike the gamete donor, did not even want a child “out there in the world” even if they were uninvolved in raising it.

xvii.This control includes the older sibling disposing of his or her younger sibling as he or she sees fit.

xviii. IBID.

xix.There might be an increase in single parents if we allow the following type of cloning. Imagine that a parent and only child dies in a car crash. Perhaps the surviving spouse ought to be allowed to clone the deceased child even if fertile and thus able to conceive a child with someone else who is not presently a lover. Without such a cloning option, living spouses will never be able to combine part of themselves with their beloved, now unfortunately deceased, and create a new life that lives on past them. There may not be much more important to the surviving spouses than creating a child with their “one true love.” But again, as in the case of cloning a child that had reached the age of maturity before dying, we will need to have in place a system of consent perhaps modeled somewhat on that for organ donation. Difficult issues of tacit and counterfactual consent, as well as default positions will have to be broached. But if this form of cloning is compatible with our outline principle, and I think it is, then we have a fourth type of permissible cloning.

xx. “Clone the Clowns.” Economist. March 1, 1997. P. 80.

xxi. Posner, Erich and Posner, Richard. “The Demand for Cloning.” in Clones and Clones: Facts

and Fantasies about Cloning. p. 248.

xxii.But sperm banks take this natural obstacle away from unbalanced women.

xxiii.For a typical expression of these fears, see the article “Ewegenics” by Jean Bethke Elshtain in The New Republic. March 31, 1997

xxiv. But on the lighter side, one of the best ways to ensure that there is never another Nazi Party or Stalinist comunist movement is to allow cloning. Can you imagine thirty megalomaniacal Hitlers trying to share power? Or thirty Stalins?

xxv. However, it could be argued that experimentation in the democratic countries may remove any of the medical or technical problems that may arise from cloning which thus makes it easier for despots abroad to sucessfully work their nefarious schemes.

xxvi.So it is only scary people within our own borders that we have any power to prevent from cloning thirty copies of themselves. But who is going to get thirty women, or fewer women having more than one pregnancy, to carry their clones to term? In all likelihood, only a mesmerizing cult leader is so capable. Anyway, if such men could obtain the services of thirty women to be impregnated with clones, then they could just as easily convince the same thirty followers to have their children in the “traditional” manner and thus still manage to pass on half their genes. Any thirty women who consented to having children with a cult leader are probably just as mad and evil as he is. So if we take some scientific liberties and assume that evil and madness can be inherited, we have virtually just as much to fear from such men naturally