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Divorce of Love and Life
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What Child is This?
What did they die of?
You are the Man
You may be a liberal if...
Get Rid of that Worthless Relative
Planned Un-Parenthood
Weighing Pro-Life Issues Prior to Voting

by Monsignor James C. Brunner	Faith Points

At the Roslin Institute in Scotland scientists have cloned an adult sheep. They hollowed out one oocyte (egg cell) removing its nucleus. They replaced this with a cell from the mammary gland of a ewe. The two cells became fused as one. The researchers then placed the cell into a third ewe which gave birth to a healthy lamb named "Dolly" who apparently like the Dolly of Broadway fame is "looking swell." Dolly is not a copy of the original, but the same as genetically identical twin, separated by years rather than minutes or hours as in the case of natural identical twins. Identical twins can be quite different in personality and so Dolly is not a carbon copy of the ewe that furnished the cell from which she was cloned. So there is no danger that hundreds of cloned Hitlers will be loosed on the world.

The big scientific breakthrough is in fusing the two cells. Researchers had to slow down the cell division of the transplanted cell so that it would be in step with the host cell in order to allow fusion to occur. Previously scientists considered differentiated adult cells as being no longer totipotent in their ability to make other cell types. That is because most of the genes had been turned off and only the genes needed for its specialized function were still "on." Building a lamb from an adult cell shows that genes can be turned back on.

There is a possible upside to the process if it is limited to animal husbandry and to producing human parts rather than a whole human organism. By controlling genes in animals they could become better producers of wool, meat, milk, or eggs. Cloning might save endangered species. Learning to turn genes off and on might be useful in growing skin for burn victims or bone marrow for cancer patients and possibly pancreatic or liver cells. Inserting human hormones into the mammary glands of a sheep might allow them to be harvested from the animal’s milk. Or else animals could be cloned to produce pharmaceutical proteins and thereby become huge herds of walking drug plants. Possibly the process might produce human parts that could replace new limbs for severed ones.

There is also a downside to the process. If there is ever an attempt to clone a human it opens up new avenues of exploitation of human beings. The process minimizes differentiation. Shuffling of characteristics is nature’s way of ensuring survival. Consanguinity or marriage too close in degree of relationship can be harmful because it minimizes adequate shuffling. What is the parent-child relationship because there is no mother or father in the normal sense? Who would "own" a cloned human being. If it comes from my genes is it mine? Could a cloned human being be a depository for spare parts? Could people with admirable qualities sell their DNA? Would it be possible to produce off-the-shelf, designer children? Could DNA be taken from a child before it dies of some disease in order to replace the lost child? It would not be a true replacement but a genetically identical younger twin. And what do you do with failures? The Scottish scientists made 277 attempts before producing Dolly. On the way many implants were spontaneously aborted and some died shortly after birth. Are we prepared to accept the cost of bad or defective copies or do we eliminate them?

Cloning will add new opportunities for using and manipulating human beings to those already present in use of embryos resulting from in vitro fertilization. If an embryo is not a human person in law or fact why should it not be treated as any human culture? The National Institute of Health (NIH) sees no moral problem in using federal funds to create, manipulate, and throw away thousands of human embryos every year. The rationale is that we should derive as much benefit as possible from them before discarding them. This is eerily reminiscent of the attitude of the Nazi doctors who used for research persons in concentration camps who were destined for death anyhow. The NIH endorses creating or cloning human embryos for experimentation and then destroying them. Cloning embryos would produce a twin "brother or sister" useful for comparison to different conditions and treatments.

Even if cloning did not lead to the abuses of fellow human beings outlined above it would still be immoral because it is an affront to a human person who is the image and the likeness of God. Instead of coming to existence through the distinctly human act of the loving embrace of husband and wife the person begins life as an object of manipulation in a laboratory dish. The only proper environment for a human to come into existence is in a mother’s womb. A child has a right to parents and cloned individuals do not have parents in the normal sense. The conjugal act is at once physical act of intercourse and a spiritual act of love reflecting the physical and spiritual aspects of humanity. To separate the spiritual from the physical is to act in an inhuman way. The child thus produced is affronted because it is treated not as the fruit of a loving union but as an object of technological manipulation. Cloning exceeds the bounds of stewardship set by the creator, a dominion that extends to animals not made to God’s image and likeness but not to humans who are so made. Human cloning leads to degradation of the dignity of the parents and the child produced. It will undoubtedly grease the skids of that slippery slope leading to ever-greater disrespect for human life. Cloning of humans is inhuman.