 |
|
|
|
||
|
<% dim printurl
printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%>
|
|
July
29, 2002, 9:00 a.m. By NR Editors, from the August 12, 2002, issue of National Review |
|
he
president's bioethics council, headed by Leon Kass, recommended a ban
on the cloning of human embryos to produce babies and a four-year moratorium
on cloning for biomedical research. Since the recommendation falls short
of the president's call for a permanent ban on all human cloning, some
reporters greeted the report as an embarrassment to the president. But
it does not seem possible to get such a ban through the Senate, as presently
constituted. The practical effect of the report is to build support for
a moratorium, which is still in play.
The report helped to clarify the debate by avoiding the distorted terminology that cloning supporters have preferred to use. In the media and on the floor of Congress, cloning supporters have maintained that a cloned human embryo is neither a clone, nor human, nor an embryo. On the council, however, with a few exceptions, even the supporters of cloning avoided doublespeak. The report was honest in another important respect as well. Biotech lobbyists claim that the promise of cloning is that it will provide transplantable tissue. There will be no danger of rejection, since the tissue will be taken from the clone of a patient. The council — again, including the pro-cloning minority on it — does not pretend that the primary purpose of cloning is therapeutic. Those who defend cloning do so on the ground that it will enable scientists to build "disease models" by watching the progress of a disease in the cloned embryos. Whether lobbyists and senators are willing to defend this project to congressmen remains to be seen.
The pro-cloning council members performed another service, too, albeit an inadvertent one: They demonstrated the weakness of the arguments for considering it morally permissible to destroy embryonic human beings in the process of research. Several of these dissenting council members claimed that the high rates of spontaneous abortion make it foolish to treat embryos in the earliest stages of development as living human beings. But this is a clear non sequitur. If it were valid, it would establish that in any time or place where infant mortality rates were sufficiently high, it would be morally permissible to kill infants.
Often this argument was supplemented with an appeal to moral sentiments. Our friend James Q. Wilson, for example, argued that we should be guided by the fact that we grieve more at the death of a newborn than at the death of an embryo. But we may grieve more at the death of a twelve-year-old than at the death of a newborn. Whether it is licit to kill either one of them does not, in any case, depend on how anyone feels toward him.
Other dissenters thought that an embryo could not be said to exist as long as twinning remained possible. This, too, is sophistry. Cloning can, in theory, create an embryo genetically identical to any one of us — can provide us, so to speak, with a twin. This possibility does not mean that we are not individual organisms. A flatworm is a flatworm even if it can be split into two flatworms.
The most compelling argument that the dissenters mounted was that an embryo lacks a nervous system, consciousness, and the capacity for suffering, and that it is these attributes that confer people with the right to be treated with concern and respect, including the right not to be killed for the possible benefit of others. But if rights depend on consciousness, why should newborn infants or the comatose be protected? Why, for that matter, protect people who are sleeping? They could be killed in a painless manner, with no suffering involved.
Implicitly or explicitly, proponents of cloning believe that our rights depend on our having certain traits, such as mental functions. Since these traits come in varying degrees (and well after birth), it is hard to see how the pro-cloning view can be made consistent with the basic American belief that people are equal in dignity and rights. If, on the other hand, human beings are intrinsically valuable — if they deserve protection from harm merely by virtue of being human beings, and not because of any additional traits they may or may not have — then they must have worth and deserve protection regardless of their size, age, or stage of development.
That conclusion imposes certain obligations on political leaders and on citizens. It requires them to work toward a ban on practices that violate the principle that all human life should be protected — including the destruction of cloned human embryos in research. The president's council is right: Congress should enact a moratorium on human cloning this year. But the president himself is even more right: Eventually, Congress should ban the practice altogether.