Cathy Young wrote an interesting analysis of the debate surrounding genetic engineering, Monkeying Around with the Self, for Reason magazine. Young basically argued that while we should not give in to the extreme opponents of genetic engineering, neither should we fail to realize that there are genuine moral quandaries raised by genetic engineering. But what intrigued me about the article was her discussion of recently announced plans to clone a human being.
Two Italian doctors, Panos Zavos and Severino Antinori — neither of whom are strangers to reproductive controversies — announced that they will attempt to create a viable cloned embryo and find a woman willing to bring the embryo to term.
Many people oppose such cloning, but mainly for reasons that are rooted in a misunderstanding of what cloning entails. Typically people think that a clone will be identical in every way to the donor of the genetic material, but in fact a cloned baby would be just another baby. There would not be anything more remarkable about a cloned baby than there would be about genetic twins who also share identical genetic material but are hardly exact copies of each other in terms of behavior, personality, etc.
There is one enormous problem with trying to clone a baby at this juncture, however. Scientists still are not very good at cloning animals. Most cloned animal embyros have so many birth defects that they spontaneously abort. Of the few that don’t spontaneously abort, a large percentage are still born or die within a few days after birth. Of those who don’t die shortly after birth, most have severe genetic defects including a tendency toward excessively large organs.
The number of cloned embryos who make it to relatively healthy living animals is exceedingly small. This is not much of an issue when dealing with animals, but presents a huge moral quandary when attempting to clone human beings. It strikes many people as morally repugnant to create a human being that is almost certain to have the sort of debilitating birth defects that are all but unprecedented in traditional sexual reproduction. Certainly sexual reproduction does carry such risks, but the odds of such a large collection of severe birth defects in one infant are almost negligible compared to the near certainty that a cloned infant would suffer from such defects.
As Young sums it up,
The real ethical problem of cloning, as REASON Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey argues, is that at present, mammals cloned from adult cells appear to be at a high risk for congenital abnormalities. It would be immoral to expose a human infant to such risks. But if the procedure is perfected in nonhuman mammals to the point of being safe, cloning won’t change the basic character of human beings.
I agree with Young’s view, but wonder what effect grappling with these ethical issues will have on the abortion debate.
At the heart of the pro-choice movement, especially the pro-abortion views of many radical feminists, is the view that people do not owe any moral obligations to fetuses. Want to abort a fetus in the 8th month? No problem. Smoke crack right up until the hour before you go into labor? Don’t you dare call that child abuse. Feminists and pro-choice advocates rise up to smack down any attempt to infer that people could possibly moral obligations to fetuses.
And yet if you agree with Young that it would be unethical to expose an infant to the sort of risks that cloning currently would entail, that view is completely incompatible with the claim that there are no moral duties toward fetuses. After all the clever opponent of abortion will ask, “If it’s unethical to create a fetus that likely has a lot of birth defects, why is it okay to turn around and kill that fetus on a whim?”
Any answer to that question inevitably raises the spectre of potentiality. The reason it is unethical to intentionally create a human clone under current conditions is because the fetus will potentially be born with birth defects. But if people owe moral duties to potential persons, abortion gets ditched out the window since it presupposes that, in fact, we don’t have moral duties to potential persons (since every fertilized zygote is a potential person), unless someone wants to maintain that a fetus has an interest in not being born with birth defects but has no interest in being born, which seems bizarre on its face.
Although I am a supporter of abortion rights, both the standard legal and moral justifications of abortion remain extraordinarily deficient — which is why the pro-life movement is making strides while the pro-choice movement flounders.
Not that I have any great solution. I just wish abortion activists would sit down and actually think through these issues rather than simply launch ad hoc attacks that, taken together, don’t represent a consistent ethical position on abortion.
Sources:
Monkeying Around with the Self. Cathy Young, Reason, April 2001.
Baby cloning plans under fire. The BBC, March 10, 2001.
Human cloning: The ‘terrible odds’. Donald Bruce, The BBC, March 9, 2001.