Human Reproductive Cloning - Brutes or Angels: Human Possibility in the Age of Biotechnology - page 188

transferred to women's wombs. sacrificing blastocysts and endangering
women and developing fetuses in the interest of developing a technology
for safe reproductive cloning would be morally unacceptable.
research with early human embryos would certainly be needed in order
to make sCnT safe for human reproductive cloning. for persons who as-
sign full personhood to fertilized eggs and embryos through the blasto-
cyst stage, such research would be morally unacceptable. But even if the
technology for generating human embryos by sCnT were perfected, trial
transfers of cloned embryos into women's wombs would need to be done.
A major ethical concern would be how to respect the autonomy of the un-
born clone whose health is put at risk. The concern might be addressed as
it was for early ivf procedures, by giving parents the authority to make in-
formed choices on behalf of their unborn babies. nevertheless, this objec-
tion is substantive and deserves thoughtful public discussion.
Objection 3. Cloning humans is just plain disgusting, and we should
listen to our intuition because it is telling us that reproductive human clon-
ing violates some basic moral principle.
Gut-level disgust against cloning humans is probably the most widespread
argument against cloning. ethicists leon Kass (1997) and leigh Turner
(2004) weigh in on opposite sides of this objection to cloning. Kass, a
member of President George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics, wrote a
lengthy article titled “The Wisdom of repugnance” (1997). Kass argues
that gut-level feelings against procedures like human cloning ought to be
heeded because they usually reflect inherent wisdom about what is im-
moral. Turner, on the other hand, refutes Kass's argument in a two-page
piece titled “is repugnance Wise? visceral responses to Biotechnology”
(2004). Turner points out that feelings of repugnance are usually learned
responses that reflect prejudices and fears rather than wisdom about natu-
ral moral laws.
There is wisdom on both sides of this argument. The nearly universal