Close the Door on Human Cloning
By Wesley J. Smith
National Review; January 14, 2002

[Pro-Life Infonet Note: Wesley J. Smith is a frequent contributor to
National Review and author of Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical
Ethics in America.]

There's an old saw about a man whose wife comes home unexpectedly and
finds him in bed with his naked mistress. "Who is that woman_" the
outraged wife demands. The man, a surprised and innocent look on his face,
says: "Woman_ What woman_"

Cloning apologists remind me of that philandering husband. Their opponents
point out that a cloned human embryo is a human life, and the cloners
reply with: "Human life_ What human life_"

Unfortunately, it seems to be working, as the media and nervous
politicians continue parroting the line that a human-clone embryo is not
really human.

The biotech industry has nothing to lose and everything to gain from this.
Hoping to make vast fortunes from patented "products" derived from the
destruction of embryonic life, Big Biotech is counting on being able to
create an unlimited supply of human clones. Their problem: The American
people believe there is something inherently valuable about human life.
Cloning sheep and other animals is one thing -- but cloning humans, that's
different.

The House of Representatives has already passed a strong ban. President
Bush strongly supports outlawing human cloning and is guaranteed to sign
legislation as soon as it reaches his desk. The only task remaining before
cloning humans becomes illegal is passage of the ban by the United States
Senate.

Pushed into a corner, pro-cloners responded by mounting an intense
public-relations and lobbying campaign aimed at thwarting passage of
S-790, the Senate counterpart to the House anti-cloning bill. The cloners'
approach: Agree to outlaw "reproductive" cloning (that is, implanting a
clone into a womb for purposes of gestation and birth) -- but allow
so-called "therapeutic" cloning (cloning used for research, that
culminates in the death of the clone) to proceed unhindered.

But such a policy would open the door to the unlimited cloning of human
life -- because the act of cloning does not occur at birth. A clone is
created when the nucleus is removed from a human egg and implanted with
genetic material taken from the person being cloned. The egg is then
stimulated and reacts as if it had been fertilized. Once this occurs, the
act of cloning is complete. After that, it's only a matter of what's done
to the human life that has been created: research which destroys it
(therapeutic cloning) or implantation in a womb (reproductive cloning).

And here's where the cloning advocates get disingenuous. In order to allay
Americans' disgust toward human cloning, Big Biotech argues that a human
embryo created by cloning isn't really a human life. Embryology textbooks,
however, will beg to differ. The science of the matter is that once
embryonic development commences, a separate and distinct human life exits.
For the first eight weeks of its life, it is known as an embryo.
Thereafter, until birth, it is called a fetus.

In either category, the developing life is an individual, self-contained
form of human life with its own genetic makeup and gender. Given
sufficient time, healthy genes, and the right environment in which to
gestate, it will result in the birth of a human baby. But -- whether or
not the embryo is ever born -- scientifically, it is a human life from the
beginning of its existence as a distinct organism.

But that truth hinders the cloning agenda. So, advocates have mounted a
campaign to redefine words. The following are just a few of their
rhetorical gambits.

The myth of the "pre-embryo". One of the most pervasive arguments made by
promoters of human cloning -- as well as those defending embryonic stem
cell research (ESCR) -- is that embryos younger than two weeks'
development are really "pre-embryos." There's just one problem with that
assertion: There is no such thing as a pre-embryo.

Don't take my word for it. Princeton biologist and cloning enthusiast Lee
M. Silver admitted in Remaking Eden that the term pre-embryo has "been
embraced wholeheartedly for reasons that are political, not scientific."
He further states that the term "is useful in the political arena -- where
decisions are made about whether to allow early embryo (now pre-embryo)
experimentation" Or we can turn to basic embryology. The authors of the
textbook Human Embryology & Teratology have refused to recognize the
existence of a "pre-embryo" because: (1) it is ill-defined; (2) it is
inaccurate; (3) it is unjustified, because the accepted meaning of the
word embryo includes all of the first 8 weeks; (4) it is equivocal,
because it may convey the erroneous idea that a new human organism is
formed at only some considerable time after fertilization; and (5) it was
introduced in 1986 "largely for public policy reasons."

The clone embryo is merely a collection of dividing cells. A more recent
attempt to strip the clone of its humanity claims that the embryo clone is
nothing more than dividing somatic cells that are no different, in kind or
nature, than the cells you lose every day in your shower. Pro-cloner Alan
Russell, executive director of the Pittsburgh Tissue Engineering
Initiative, wrote in a recent opinion column in the Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette:

All cells contain DNA, which gives them the ability to reproduce. But
cloners have discovered that if one removes the DNA from mom's egg cell
(producing an empty cell) and replaces it with her daughter's DNA, the
newly produced cell can survive

We then have in our hands a fresh cell which from now on will look like
her daughter's cell In a dish, technology will exist to take that cell and
simply convince it to multiply -- clone itself The process is called
cloning because the new cell created in the laboratory has the ability to
copy itself again and again before turning itself into the liver cell that
your loved one so desperately needs.

If there were an Academy Award for disingenuousness in advocacy, Russell
would be a shoe-in. First, the entity is not called a clone because its
cells divide. If that were true, all cells would be clones -- since all
cells replace themselves through cellular division.

Second, a clone is so named because the cloned entity is virtually
identical, genetically, to the provider of the genetic material used to
replace the nucleus of the egg. (I say "virtually" because a minute amount
of genetic material from the egg becomes part of the genetic makeup of the
new cloned entity.)

Third, while it's true that replacing the egg nucleus with the DNA of the
cloned person is the primary technique used to clone in the laboratory,
this genetic transfer is not all that happens. As stated earlier, the
cloner must next stimulate the genetically modified egg to grow in the
same fashion as it would had it been fertilized. Thus, just as Dolly the
cloned sheep is not its mother, so a cloned human embryo is not merely a
somatic cell line derived from the person who was cloned; it is a separate
and distinct living entity.

Finally, the "new cell" does not "copy itself again and again" until, as
if by magic, it suddenly becomes various body tissues. Rather, if the
cloned embryo survived long enough he or she would go through exactly the
same stages of development as any other baby -- from an embryo, to a
fetus, to birth. Indeed, as the clone embryo nears two weeks' development,
its makeup has changed dramatically from what existed at the single-cell
stage. Like its naturally created counterpart, he or she would now be made
up primarily of undifferentiated stem cells, which would, given the time
to develop, become all of the tissues of the body -- such as, for
instance, the liver tissue referenced by Russell. It is these stem cells
that are the current targets of the biotech industry.

"If it has the ability to twin, it isn't human." Some cloning supporters
claim that an embryo isn't really human life until it can no longer become
an identical twin. The idea seems to be that until the time in embryonic
development when identical twinning cannot occur, the embryo isn't really
a human individual. Since human research clones would be destroyed prior
to that time, destroying the clone would not actually take a human life.

The argument is ridiculous. Naturally occurring identical twins originate
from the same fertilized egg. (Fraternal twins develop from different
fertilized eggs.) Twinning occurs early in gestation when the single
embryo splits into two identical embryos -- a natural form of cloning.
These identical embryos are now siblings.

Before twinning, an embryo -- whether naturally conceived or cloned -- is
an individual, self-contained embryonic human life with a gender and an
individual genetic makeup. After identical twinning, there are now two
individual, self-contained human lives, each having an identical gender
and genetic makeup. In other words, there are now two human lives instead
of one. However, even though they appear to be identical genetically, each
life is unique. (For example, should the twins ever be born, each would
have different fingerprints.)

Advocates of the Brave New World Order know that, in the cloning debate,
we confront the most fundamental issue possible: Does individual human
life have inherent value simply and merely because it is human_ They also
know that if the answer is yes, we will ban human cloning as an immoral
and unethical objectification of human life.

(This would not mean abandoning medical research into the potential of
human cellular therapies. To the contrary, by dropping our pursuit of
cloning and ESCR, all our resources and energies could be aggressively
applied to pursuing adult/alternative stem-cell therapies that offer the
potential benefits of ESCR -- without degrading the value of some human
life to that of cattle herds or timber forests.)

But if Big Biotech and its apologists are able to convince the public that
the answer is no -- if they succeed in excluding embryos from our common
humanity in order to justify harvesting their parts -- the value of human
life itself will be transformed from an objective good into a matter of
mere opinion. That, in turn, would lead us to create subjective criteria
by which to judge which humans have lives that are sacrosanct, and which
do not.

And, it turns out, this is exactly what the modern bioethics movement is
already doing. According to "personhood theory," being a part of the human
community is not what matters. What counts is being part of the "moral
community." Those who belong are "persons," a status gained -- whether by
a human or an animal -- by possessing certain cognitive abilities, such as
being self-aware over time. Those who do not belong are "non persons,"
humans (and other life forms) that have insufficient ability to reason,
and that therefore have lives of significantly less moral concern.

The humans generally cast into the outer darkness of non-personhood
include all unborn life (whether created by cloning or by fertilization);
newborn infants; people with advanced dementia; and those in persistent
coma, or who have other significant cognitive disabilities. Not only do
these humans not possess the right to life, they may not have the right to
bodily integrity. Indeed, it has been argued in the world's most respected
medical and bioethics journals that the body parts of non persons --
whether organs, corneas, or embryonic stem cells -- should be available to
harvest for the benefit of persons. In this sense, the debate over cloning
and ESCR is merely one battlefield of a much larger war.