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Notice: GeekPress is back up and running, thanks to Paul! It's still a not-so-serious tech news blog, but the format is significantly looser. Diana, having given up programming for philosophy, has her own philosophical blog NoodleFood. More of her work can be found at DianaHsieh.com.

 

Should Human Cloning be Banned? Maybe

9:22:37 pm mst / 6 February 2001 found by paul / filed in legal / source Reason 28 hits / 2 comments / 0 e-mails

This article from Reason takes the surprising position of advocating a temporary ban on human cloning for reproductive purposes. The author's main argument is that cloning has a sufficiently high risk of giving rise to serious malformations and birth defects. Hence, creating such a clone would be equivalent to negligently maiming the infant. The author is careful to make the point that the ban should only be temporary until science advances to the point that the risk of birth defects with cloning is the same as with sexual reproduction. He also has no objection to therapeutic cloning which only creates tissues (e.g. for transplantation), not babies.

Diana points out that the argument still doesn't make sense from a libertarian perspective. After all, parents with genetic diseases risk passing those traits onto their children through sexual reproduction, yet Reason doesn't advocate outlawing such couples from having kids.

Comments

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incest is illegal by MysteriousStranger 4:06:26 am mst / 7 February 2001 / # 1

May I point out that incest (sexual reproduction between close relatives) is forbidden. Cloning oneself is practically the same thing although the results will most likely be more satisfactory. Millions of years of evolution has demonstrated that sexual reproduction is the way to go and it is my firm belief that any group of people that choose to ignore that lession will become extinct (although it will take quite some time of course).

Should Human Cloning Be Banned? Maybe. by RonBailey 6:42:47 am mst / 7 February 2001 / # 2

Diana's point about permitting parents who bear genes for genetic disease to have children is valid. However, generally the risk that carriers of disease genes will bear children with genetic diseases is between 25% and 50%--not 96% to 98% that the animal studies of cloning suggest would be true for cloned babies at the present state of technology. Today, thanks to advances in biotech, parents can now often be tested reliably for disease genes. Once they know that their prospective children are at risk, they can have embryos and fetuses tested for the disease and if found, they can thus choose to avoid implanting defective embryos or terminate the pregnancy. Also it seems to me that would-be parents of clones who would be imposing such high risks of injury are not really thinking of what's best for their children. They are close to crossing, if they haven't already gone completely over, the admittedly fuzzy line of treating a person as a means rather than an end in herself.