This is the time, and now is the moment, and Massachusetts is the place. The advantage of therapeutic cloning, Kennedy told the Boston Globe, is, one, you can get the exact genetic match, and you eliminate the real possibilities of rejection, which is going to be key in this whole area of research.īanning it or prohibiting it, making it illegal, would be a major mistake. Senator Kennedy himself, like many other elected officials in our country, has promoted laws to encourage this form of research cloning. Taking advantage of others to use them as our own repair kits, while convenient for those experiencing bodily decline, is also intrinsically immoral. This approach is sometimes termed clone and kill. Therapeutic cloning the cloned embryonic brother of the senator would NOT be implanted, but rather, he would be violated as an embryo, at the hands of researchers who would harvest his stem cells (for various noble purposes, like getting genetically matched cells to treat the senator for serious ailments as the senator gets older and more frail).Reproductive cloning the cloned embryo could be implanted into a womans uterus to make a live-born, cloned child (Senator Kennedys younger identical twin who would be his gurgling baby brother).Two uses for that embryo could be proposed: The resulting cloned embryo would be the identical twin of the skin cell donor, so Senator Kennedy would have an identical twin brother who was an embryo. Imagine, for purposes of illustration, that the skin cell used for cloning was donated by Senator Ted Kennedy. Grave ethical violations are always involved in both forms of cloning: reproductive cloning and so-called therapeutic cloning. That baby would be an identical twin of the person who donated the skin cell, in the same way that Dolly the sheep was the identical twin of her mother who donated the mammary cell used to start the process off. That newly cloned embryo can either be killed in the laboratory for research, or allowed to live and grow by implanting it into a uterus, resulting in the birth of a cloned baby. The presence of the full genetic package creates a new human embryo. The procedure for cloning is fairly simple in concept it involves taking a nucleus (the full genetic package) from a body cell, like a skin cell, and transferring it inside a womans egg, after the eggs own nucleus (the half genetic package) has been taken out. Yet the mere discussion of a soulless clone serves to remind us how strikingly immoral human cloning really is, even as the mass media and various lawmakers vigorously promote a form of cloning known as therapeutic cloning. By similar reasoning, it is clear that the idea of a soulless clone is little more than an urban legend. Human cloning, in the final analysis, is simply a technique for making an identical twin of someone, and while all of us have met various sets of identical twins over the years, none of us has ever met a pair where one of the twins lacked a soul. He invites us to make moral and upright choices ourselves, so that evil in our world might not spread further, but he doesnt actively prevent us from doing evil by abrogating physical laws or refusing to ensoul embryos. Clearly, God chooses to respect the laws of physics he has established, and likewise he remains beholden to the powers of biology that he himself has set in motion, even if it is true that those same powers can be used for offensive ends by man.Īpart from purely miraculous interventions, which appear to be quite rare, God does not step in and break the humanly-initiated chain of causality which allows sinful actions and evil choices to play out with all their consequences. Likewise even though we readily see how dropping nuclear bombs on cities of innocent people would be gravely offensive, we know that God does not refuse to cooperate by suddenly suspending the laws of physics that permit such bombs to detonate. We currently have more than one million babies produced this way, all of whom do have souls infused by God. Yet back in 1978 when the first human baby was created in a Petri dish by in vitro fertilization, one might likewise have argued that such an immoral action would result in Gods not infusing a soul into any baby that was manufactured in laboratory glassware. They suppose that God would refuse to cooperate with cloning by never infusing a soul into a cloned human embryo. They sometimes express doubts that a cloned baby would have a soul, because the whole idea seems so offensive.
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