Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
semen-penetrated egg could be implanted in it, we would then have
to contend with the really difficult question implicit in Schutz's words.
Would “homunculi in retorts” be “humans” if they did not issue from
impregnation, implantation, and fertilization, and were not allowed to
stay and grow in mutual relationships within that most primal of human
environments, a female human being, a mother? If what I have suggested
is correct, nothing but a homunculus could possibly emerge from such
a retort. To be human, to repeat, is at the very least to become human,
and becoming human in stages along life's way requires that temporal,
sequential development within and nourished by another human body.
Thus, when Jean Bethke Elshtain asserts, in what she says is her own
“nightmare scenario” (cloning human beings to serve as spare parts for,
one presumes, other human beings), that “cloned entities are not fully
human,” she is quite evidently mistaken.
56
Her nightmare is nonsense—
unless
such an entity were conceived and carried in at least its initial
journey outside the mother's womb. The uterine environment, in other
words, strikes me as absolutely essential, though it is not all that is essen-
tial, for such an entity to become human.
The risk of cloning, then, is not some supposed threat that it will erase
the unique individual or its network of relationships with others (mother,
father, son, and so on). Rather, it is the loss of that for and in each of
us, which comes to be within and by means of my relating to you and
you relating to me: it is, ultimately,
we
, you and I, who are at risk. This
is not true of natural identical twins, for they are both nurtured and
enabled to grow toward birth within the mother's body, and, in that inti-
macy, come to be as and who they are—clones both of them, and none
the worse for it. When born, however much alike, they are yet destined
to be that self each is solely in relation both to its mother and others,
but especially to its twin—who are each also a self in relation both to
one another.
Concluding Reflection
The fact of the accident of birth gives a quite different sense than usual
to the idea of the slippery slope, which has had such attraction over the
past four decades. The horror at the bottom of the slope, it must now
be clear, is that there simply is no bottom, nothing solid whatsoever, only
