WITH THE RELEASE last week of its report, Human Cloning and Human Dignity (available at www.bioethics.gov), the President’s Council on Bioethics has made a large and lasting contribution to our national debate on dealing with the revolutionary advances in biotechnology that are–for better and worse–now upon us. The report is the result of six months of sober reflection and intense discussion by some of the nation’s leading thinkers and scientists, led by council chairman Leon Kass. And despite the many different perspectives, backgrounds, and political dispositions represented on the council, a majority of the council calls in the report for a four-year federal moratorium–a national ban–on all human cloning.
The first part of the report focuses on “cloning-to-produce-children.” It describes–with moral clarity and force–the horror of manufacturing human clones: a world where the mysterious coming to life of a human child becomes just another industrial process; a world where parents treat their offspring as biological experiments; a world where individuals or societies choose the genetic characteristics of the next generation according to their own plans and desires. In painting this picture, the report offers a defense of human procreation and the human family that will ground our resistance to the Brave New World to come. It also helps guide our thinking about repairing the “broken hearth” and overcoming the reproductive nihilism that is already upon us.
The second part of the report focuses on the ethics of research that exploits cloned human embryos. It offers a moving and definitive defense of the dignity of nascent human life, and warns of the moral degradation that would come from routinely creating, buying, selling, and destroying it. “We find it disquieting, even somewhat ignoble, to treat what are in fact seeds of the next generation as mere raw material for satisfying the needs of our own,” the report declares. It continues:
“How we respond to the weakest among us, to those who are nowhere near the zenith of human flourishing, says much about our willingness to envision the boundaries of humanity expansively and inclusively. It challenges . . . the depth of our commitment to equality. If from one perspective the fact that the embryo seems to amount to little may invite a weakening of our respect, from another perspective its seeming insignificance should awaken in us a sense of shared humanity. This was once our own condition. From origins that seem so little came our kin, our friends, our fellow citizens, and all human beings.”
Perhaps even the most cold-blooded scientific researchers will find something in this report to temper their unrestrained enthusiasm for creating an industry of embryo experimentation. And perhaps suffering patients–and all of us are, at least prospectively, suffering patients–will realize, as the report puts it, that,
“we are not only patients, and easing suffering is not our only moral obligation. As much as we wish to alleviate suffering now and to leave our children a world where suffering can be more effectively relieved, we also want to leave them a world in which we and they want to live–a world that honors moral limits, that respects all life whether strong or weak, and that refuses to secure the good of some human beings by sacrificing the lives of others.”
By calling for a moratorium on all human cloning, the council challenges the nation to engage in such reflection and restraint. It challenges us not simply to protect developing human life, but to face the other moral hazards of proceeding with cloned embryo (and all other embryo) research. These include the exploitation of women as egg donors, the expanding power to manipulate human life at its earliest stages, the misallocation of health care resources, and the descent toward eugenics and fetal farms that such research is likely to produce.
The President’s Council on Bioethics has done its work in clarifying what is at stake in this debate. It has connected human cloning both to the human goods it endangers and to the even more daunting wave of genetic engineering that is likely to follow, if we begin to go down this road. Now the Senate should do its duty by passing a moratorium on all human cloning before the congressional session ends.
–William Kristol
