Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
being does not arise from the loving union of a man and woman but is
manufactured to specifications.”
6
It is hard, though, to show that this is
necessarily true in every case. Indeed, cloners may be all too focused on
the aim of having their union produce a biological child; they may, if
anything, be overinvested in the child's personality and personhood.
Their efforts to produce or control a birth are not necessarily any greater
than those of couples using other types of therapy, or of couples repro-
ducing “naturally” in traditional societies, where a marriage itself may
be arranged in order to produce the right kind of heir. And nothing guar-
antees absolutely that a cloned child would be loved and nurtured any
differently from a sibling produced in the old-fashioned way.
There are a couple of ways in which reproductive cloning would
indeed be different from other kinds of procreation. First, the offspring
would have only one genetic parent. Second, the child would be the later-
born genetic twin of that parent. The novel effects of cloning on the in-
tergenerational, biologically anchored patterns of family and kinship
present the most obvious challenge to our understanding of human
“nature.” If new notions of nature are required to understand this phe-
nomenon, they probably derive from the effects of cloning on the family.
For example, parents who clone children from themselves would be
raising sons or daughters who are also their twins; their spouses would
become the parents of younger versions of their husbands or wives. I
believe great caution is to be advised, and a strong “hermeneutic of sus-
picion” should be aimed at those who downplay the significance of
human asexual and replicative reproduction in order to pursue financial
gain or as an answer to their personal problems and desires. The fact
that at least some would-be cloners and customers are willing to proceed
with an untested technology despite the risks to embryos, fetuses, chil-
dren, and families is another strong moral contraindication.
Nonetheless, the precise immorality of cloning is difficult to specify in
“intrinsicist” terms. The novelty of cloning in departing from all known
types of parenthood and kinship does not clearly make it immoral.
Change does not necessarily equate to harm or violation, and a judg-
ment of the latter is necessary before we can designate any activity as
immoral. Philosophically, there is an important distinction between using
the term nature in the descriptive or factual sense and using it to indi-
cate the normatively human: those aspects of humanity that should be
