Big Step Toward Human Clone Farms
Pastor Dale Morgan
Big Step Toward Human Clone Farms*
By Deacon Keith Fournier
1/21/2008
There is an urgent need for regulation of the new "market" which these
new technologies promote. In this age of scientism and dualism, the
human body has become a thing, one more field for experimentation. As a
culture, we have succumbed to an approach to technological
experimentation that has embraced the notion that whatever can be done
should be done.
LOS ANGELES - There is news out of California, which, if proven to be
true, shows that one more moral line in the sand has been crossed. Dr.
Samuel Wood of Stemagen Corp. in La Jolla, California claims to have
cloned himself.
MSNBC reported that if the lab’s claims are true, “it is the first
instance of cloning humans – only as embryos in a Petri dish, but still
cloned human beings.” Wood told the network “it was an amazing
experience to look at that blastocyst and realize that it came from one
of my cells. It’s a bit like looking at yourself from a long time ago.”
Bioethics Defense Fund President and constitutional lawyer Nikolas T.
Nikas notes that this news highlights the necessity of state and federal
legislation banning the creation of cloned human embryos for any purpose:
“If true, the creation of human beings, at the embryonic stage of life
by cloning, marks a new and decisive step toward turning human
reproduction into a manufacturing process. The creation of human embryos
for the purpose of exploitation as raw material for lab experiments is
grossly immoral and a blatant violation of human dignity,” said Nikas.
He is absolutely correct.
Dorinda C. Bordlee, BDF senior counsel, added that this announcement,
“puts young women’s reproductive health at risk because it will increase
the demand for labs to treat women as egg farms by paying them to
undergo dangerous hormone treatments so that the lab can harvest 10-20
human eggs per cycle for their cloning experiments.”
The Bioethics Defense Fund offers model legislation to ban human cloning
and human egg harvesting at its web site, www.BDFund.org. I recommend
the legislation and the Fund’s important work to all of my readers.
Bioethics Defense Fund is a public-interest legal organization whose
mission includes advocating for human rights in science through
litigation, legislation and public education.
I remember when I was a much younger man. There was a silly country
western tune, the refrain of which use to always make me smile. It was
unique amidst the typical country lyrics concerning love affairs gone
awry and hopes dashed against a sea of almost constant infidelity. It
had a comical refrain: "I'm my own grandpa!"
I would laugh aloud to myself each time I heard it play on the local
country music station.
The basic story line of the song concerned a series of illicit
relationships, which, through the most improbable turns of sexual
promiscuity and infidelity, resulted in the claim of this country
crooner being true—he had become his own grandpa!
Little did I imagine then that the worldview unleashed and “legitimized”
by the US Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, a decision which relegated an
entire class of persons, children in the womb, to the status of property
to be discarded when inconvenient, would lay the cultural framework for
such possibilities to actually occur.
Sadly, that is now the case. In the last year of the twentieth century
when Pandora’s box opened on this new science, one commentator coined
our age as "the New Clone Age."
Out of this box legal, moral, sociological, and cultural challenges now
multiply almost daily. The natural categories, of mother, father,
grandfather and grandmother are being challenged in Courts and
legislatures throughout the Nation. Those pushing the outer edge of
science now present the possibility of six "parents" for a genetically
engineered child produced, like a product, out of the petri dish.
There is the sperm vendor, the egg vendor, the surrogate "owner" of the
fetal hotel once called a womb and the various possible commissioning
"couples" all vying for legal recognition in a complex web of court
decisions. Moreover, many of these new "couples" come from among all the
various new configurations that our "enlightened" sexual libertinism has
rendered not only acceptable, but also protected, by civil rights
legislation.
A legal climate has resulted from the application of laws, originally
and rightly enacted to protect against invidious discrimination. These
once helpful laws are now being used by legal and social engineers to
protect (read "promote") promiscuous sexual behavior, heterosexual or
homosexual, outside of the marriage bond.
This is problematic enough in an age that has separated procreation from
marital love and the marital embrace. But with the new social and
cultural revolutionaries having the ability through legal precedents to
wield the police power (because everything is protected by the State
through the misapplication of civil rights laws) this new "morality"
threatens the two-parent marriage bound family and the very foundations
of Western civilization and law.
What’s more, to hold the view that sexual relations belong within
monogamous, lifelong heterosexual marriage is considered intolerant, or
even "extremist." Many have tried to raise an alarm before we all find
ourselves, and our once deeply held esteem for natural familial
relationships, relics of an age past.
So, the Bioethics Defense Fund is right to sound the alarm with this
news out of California.
There is an urgent need for regulation of the new "market" which these
new technologies promote. In this age of scientism and dualism, the
human body has become a thing, one more field for experimentation. As a
culture, we have succumbed to an approach to technological
experimentation that has embraced the notion that whatever can be done
should be done.
Baby parts, sperm, eggs, nuclei, embryos, "stem cells"—once viewed as
worthy of special legal protection—are now simply being viewed as new
consumer products. As in the horrible days of human slavery in America,
human persons have been once again been placed on the market.
Because the genetic genie is out of the bottle, we can no longer laugh
about "absurd scenarios" that, like the country tune, once seemed so
ridiculous. Our deeply held moral convictions and the laws protecting
our first mediating institution, the family, are light years behind the
dangerous march of these technologies.
Decades ago, a prominent pioneer in the science of genetics, Jerome
LeJeune, warned of the possible scenarios that these reproductive
technologies could unleash. He said, "Science is [only] a tree that
bears good and bad fruit."
We humans understand something about picking and eating fruit from
trees. We have suffered the consequences of wrong choices in our
collective past. Perhaps, it all began with that primordial wrong choice
at the tree in the garden. Regardless, we are free to choose and we are
making wrong choices once again.
The choice between cloning humans as products, or protecting the
begetting of children as persons in the nurture of a faithful marriage
and family, is the choice of our future.
How we choose may determine whether there will be a future at all. Stop
Human Cloning. We are, in the words of the ancient creed, to be
"begotten not made."