In 2001 Australian community leaders from the medical profession, the churches, the legal profession, along with ethicists and prominent citizens, signed an Open Letter entitled “ No Human Cloning”.
Read this penetrating ethical analysis of cloning, this abuse of science which would manufacture “a new race of laboratory humans with the intention, right from the beginning, to exploit and destroy them as if they were laboratory animals”.
In 2002 our political leaders drew an ethical line in the sand: they allowed research on ‘surplus' IVF embryos on the grounds that they were ‘going to die anyway', but they unanimously condemned the deliberate creation of embryos (by IVF or cloning) solely for research. It is wrong, they said, to create and destroy one life for the benefit of another.
Read the statements of leaders from the Coalition and from Labor who supported research on IVF embryos, but opposed cloning on ethical grounds – and ask, if it was so wrong in 2002, how can it be ‘right' in 2006?
In 2005 the international community voted at the United Nations to ban human cloning as ‘contrary to human dignity'. Australia supported this majority vote. One delegate expressed the principle as: "No human life should ever be produced to be destroyed for the benefit of another."
Read the ethical argument underlying the United Nations Declaration against Human Cloning to which our country is a signatory.
In the UN Declaration reference is made to the inevitable exploitation of women involved in collecting the vast number of oocytes (‘eggs' from the ovary) that would be required for human cloning: “Member States are called upon to take measures to prevent theexploitation of women in the application of life sciences”.
Read a recent article in Reproductive Biomedicine Online on the exploitation of women inherent in cloning, by an Australian lawyer, Katrina George; also link to the international group ‘Hands off our Ovaries' and a recent article in the Herald Sun by Dr David van Gend . With cloning the choice is between harvesting women's eggs or hybridizing with rabbit or pig eggs … Is either an ethical option? Is either ‘consistent with human dignity'?
Cloning for research will perfect the technique needed for cloning for live-birth and for fetal organ harvesting. While this will remain illegal in Australia , live-birth cloning is being attempted overseas and cloned-fetus farming is being promoted in major journals. Further abuses of this sort can only occur if we permit and perfect the first steps in cloning.
Read the article 'fetal attraction' by Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, Robert George: "I fear that the long-term goal is indeed to create an industry in harvesting late embryonic and fetal body parts for use in regenerative medicine and organ transplantation."
Read the defence of cloning for fetal farming by Professor of Ethics, Julian Savulescu, and a link to scientific articles testing fetal farming in cloned animals, and which compare this to human possibilities.
"Indeed, it is not merely morally permissible but morally required that we employ cloning to produce embryos or fetuses for the sake of providing cells, tissues or even organs for therapy, followed by abortion of the embryo or fetus."
For more in-depth ethical discussion, from both sides of the argument, there is no better resource than ‘Human Cloning and Human Dignity: an Ethical Enquiry' from the President's Council on Bioethics. Key chapters are ‘The Meaning of Human Cloning' and ‘The Ethics of Cloning for Biomedical Research' .
FURTHER RESOURCES...
Frank Brennan, a prominent lawyer, writes in the Australian:
"But there is a second Rubicon. That is where we now stand. Beyond this is a city where the scientist is justified in creating human life only so that he might experiment on it and destroy it without the need for any respect of the dignity of that human life.
Prof James Sherley, adult stem cell researcher at MIT, writes in the Boston Globe :
"If the hands of members of the Harvard review board were sensitive enough, they could come to know human embryos better. They could feel that the smallest such embryos, like us, are warm to the touch, that they move as they grow, and they breathe just as surely as we do.It is not too late for Harvard's review board members to come to know this simple truth and revoke the school's entry into the race to clone and exploit human embryos for research."
Read the UK Green Party's position against Cloning and Genetic Manipulation of Embryos:
H342: Experiments on human embryos could have unforeseen outcomes harmful both to individuals and to society. The Green Party believes that an immediate international ban should be placed on all cloning and genetic manipulation of embryos, whether for research, therapeutic or reproductive purposes. However, the use of 'adult' (or 'mature') stem-cells has promise for both research and therapeutic purposes and does not involve the same risks and ethical issues as embryonic stem-calls. The Green Party would therefore allow such use of adult stem-cells, subject to the precautionary principle.”
Dr David van Gend , GP and Senior Lecturer, writes in the Canberra Times:
EVEN THE SMALLEST HUMAN LIFE MATTERS - “For a while there will be general condemnation about live-birth cloning. But at some stage our culture's Word of Power will be uttered in the context of cloning: “choice”, especially reproductive choice, and the condemnation will falter.”
For a philosophical and theological perspective on 'start of life bioethics' see this recent address by Ray Campbell, of the Qld Bioethics Centre:
But Start-of-Life Bioethics also refers to the question “When does human life begin?” Indeed that would seem to be the fundamental question before you can begin to answer the others. For only then can you say what kind of being is affected by the choices being made in the early stages of its life.
Dr David van Gend writes in the Human Life Review:
The clone is nobody's child. Human kinship is grotesquely violated; the new Homo experimentus is outside the circle of human belonging, and its creation as an excluded, exploited human existence is the moral heart of this matter.
