Circumstances are rare when secular and religious commentators find some common ground on an ethical issue. The critical reaction to the announcement that a medical firm has succeeded in cloning a human embryo has been the cause for one such occasion.
The moral basis of objections to human cloning may be varied and subject to perspectives, but the chorus has been unison: the generation of human embryos for the purpose of killing them for profit–by way of selling the stem cells derived from embryonic tissue–is cause for alarm.
Advanced Cell Technology, the company at the centre of the controversy, denies that what they call the “cloned organism” is an embryo, because its creation is not the result of fertilisation of an egg by a sperm. Their preferred definition is “a new type of biological entity never before seen in nature.”
Crucially, they do not deny that what has been created is human and living.
The cloning company proposes to spawn more human life, only to kill and then sell it–creating some sort of human spare parts warehouse. Catholics need not be reminded of the ethical implications.
We have not yet arrived at that ghoulish time when human life is created to develop designer babies–although one may presume that unscrupulous scientists are already working on that. The philosophy behind the latest cloning discovery is to harvest stem cells, which may cure assorted illnesses, including Alzheimer, Parkinson and Huntington diseases.
As much as one feels for people who are afflicted by these conditions, cloning embryos is not the way to go about helping them.
Indeed, experts have pointed to alternative routes of deriving stem cells, from sources that would not hazard collective morals. New research suggests that the blood of placenta and umbilical cords as well as spontaneously aborted (miscarried) embryos could present an ethical alternative to stem cells harvested from cloned zygotes. This holds promise for the future, perhaps even imminently.
For now, scientists seem to concur that stem cells produced by embryonic tissue may be most effective in curing many illnesses.
But at what price?
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