Unsettling, Maybe, But Not Unethical
washingtonpost.com
By Richard Cohen
Thursday, January 2, 2003; Page A19
I am a twin -- no big deal, really. My other half is my sister, and so we are fraternal twins, no different from ordinary siblings, except that we were conceived at the same time. Still, I know from a lifetime of experience that just to say "I am a twin" causes people to take a step back. They are in the presence of the different.
This being the case, I can easily understand how people feel about cloning. It gives us all the willies, and we recoil from it as unnatural, an affront to God, or just plain weird. It hardly helps matters that the cult that recently announced it had cloned a child also believes that all human beings stem from a race of alien scientists who cloned themselves. They produced you, me and, somehow, Liza Minnelli.
Yet a form of cloning already exists in nature: identical twins. They are a genetic match of one another -- no different in that sense from a clone produced from the genetic material of a dead sibling. The difference is that one is produced in nature, the other in the lab.
The distinction is not, I grant you, insignificant. It raises all sorts of questions. But these questions ought to be debated and studied -- and not dismissed by fiat, as is the intention of a whole bunch of politicians, religious leaders and conservative intellectuals who would, if they could, close the spigot on cloning and stop it cold.
It cannot be done. Congress might revive and pass a bill like the one that failed two years ago, banning all sorts of cloning, but the rest of the world is not necessarily going to follow. Women desperate for a child will simply go where cloning is either legal or merely tolerated -- and come back pregnant. There is, as far as I know, no law banning pregnant women from entering the United States.
The word that keeps getting attached to cloning is "unethical." It's a powerful word, but in the case of cloning it merely gets asserted, never proved. It just so happens that at the moment, cloning is unethical because the procedure is experimental -- and you don't go skinny-dipping in the gene pool. But someday, the procedure will not be all that chancy. What then would make cloning unethical?
Nothing. It would be just be another form of reproduction. It's hard to see how it's less ethical than the drunken coupling of teenagers in the back of a car or the impregnation of a woman through rape or incest -- not grounds for abortion, some very ethical people insist. And while cloning may always involve some risk, so too does the usual method.
This is bravest of new worlds. And it will require some brave, new thinking. Terms like "ethical" or "human dignity" simply cloud the debate. I, for one, don't find it particularly ethical to persist in dangerous pregnancies or to have a brood of children. Others insist otherwise. I don't think it's particularly ethical to tell teenagers that the way to deal with their sexuality is through abstinence -- and not, above all, through knowledge of contraceptive devices and procedures. Others, including George W. Bush, insist otherwise.
In the debate about cloning -- even cloning designed to produce cures for diseases that are now incurable -- the same old language gets used. But it is language rooted in religion and religious values -- and specific, narrow ones at that. They are hardly universal. I can see nothing wrong in therapeutic cloning, just as I see nothing wrong in certain kinds of abortions. As for reproductive cloning, I can appreciate the objections -- but they are not ethical in nature.
The Raelians, the sect that triggered the latest cloning controversy, stand accused of giving the entire science a black eye. Who could argue? And yet, these wackos -- at least I hope they're wacky -- have also done us a favor. They have offered us a glimpse into the future -- not just of cloning, but of a science forced into medical back alleys by politicians who utter oaths to "ethics" when their true allegiance is to tradition. They confuse ethics with familiarity.
Therapeutic cloning holds great promise. Reproductive cloning is a different matter, but it too could have its uses. We cannot permit either our repugnance for a weird cult or our fear of the different to produce a retreat from a knowledge that is almost certain to be used anyway and that -- just maybe -- could save or enrich lives. Now that would be unethical.
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