The Bogeyman Cometh
Girding for battle.

By Kevin Cherry, deputy director of policy at Empower America. The ideas expressed are the author’s own.
August 8, 2001 10:20 a.m.

n his column on Tuesday in the Washington Post, Richard Cohen assails the recent House vote to ban human cloning. While granting that the prospect of human cloning is "scary," Cohen argues that the practice is "not quite around the corner." Yesterday's announcement by Italian scientist Severino Antinori that he intends to begin cloning human beings in November shows that the question is indeed before us now.

Cohen responds to the arguments of bioethicists Leon Kass and Daniel Callahan by saying that the two have not advanced any arguments, only the conclusion that human cloning is "unethical." Perhaps that is the only way Cohen could respond to the objections of Kass and Callahan. A simple glance at their recent New Republic piece reveals a host of ethical objections raised by the duo (the piece even cites Kass's earlier, and more compelling, piece). To quote Kass and Callahan:

The vast majority of Americans object to human cloning. And they object on multiple grounds: It constitutes unethical experimentation on the child-to-be, subjecting him or her to enormous risks of bodily and developmental abnormalities. It threatens individuality, deliberately saddling the clone with a genotype that has already lived and to whose previous life its life will always be compared. It confuses identity by denying the clone two biological parents and by making it both twin and offspring of its older copy. Cloning also represents a giant step toward turning procreation into manufacture; it is the harbinger of much grizzlier eugenic manipulations to come. Permitting human cloning means condoning a despotic principle: that we are entitled to design the genetic makeup of our children.

Cohen is right that these ethical objections are not expanded upon in the piece. However, this is because the piece took as given the moral objections to reproductive cloning, and focused on the question of banning therapeutic cloning. It would be akin to faulting Shakespeare for not explaining in Henry V precisely what happened in Henry IV. If Cohen needs a summary of the objections against human cloning, he would do well to read the aforementioned piece by Kass.

One of Cohen's final arguments is that Republican leaders in the House "substitute faith for thought. For a minister, that's okay. For a legislator, it's a sin." But Cohen's own position is one of faith: Faith that cloning will fulfill all the promises he has made for it. Faith that technology will not be taken advantage of by the "mad scientists" (like Dr. Antinori). Faith that technological advances are indeed synonymous with progress.

Given the barbarism that the 20th century brought us, I should think Richard Cohen might hesitate before making that leap of faith. He did not hesitate, however, because of the relevance of cloning to the stem-cell debate. "Think of what could be done," Cohen urges us, "with cells produced, not by a stranger, but by the recipient himself." The House cloning ban included a ban on cloning embryos for research, not solely for reproduction. It could not be otherwise: It would be impossible to enforce a ban on the latter if the former is not banned as well. For if a cloned embryo were implanted, would the woman be forced to have an abortion? Would we punish the woman after the birth — akin to locking the hen-house door after the wolf has made his way in?

Those who defended embryonic-stem-cell research have long argued that it would involve only those embryos marked for destruction. It would not involve the creation and destruction of embryos solely for research, we were told. Recent news reports that a company in Virginia is doing precisely that should make us pause — as should Cohen's own all-too-candid admission that he in fact desires such "progress." Unfortunately, Cohen's logic is all-too-consistent. If it is morally licit for embryos to be used for research, then it is difficult to argue convincingly against the creation of embryos for research — difficult but not impossible.

For one can be against human cloning without opposing embryonic-stem-cell research on embryos that might otherwise be discarded. The creation of genetically identical individuals is far different from any advances in reproductive technology that allow a man and a woman to reproduce more efficiently. But one cannot support so-called therapeutic cloning without tacitly endorsing reproductive cloning. Cohen sees this clearly; his conclusions may be wrong, but his logic is sound. In the battles ahead, conservatives must be prepared to argue not just against the specter of reproductive cloning that looms ahead, but also against the "therapeutic" cloning that is now taking place.