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Illegal Beings: Human Clones
Scare tactics and contradictions
SC ( 10/19/2004, 18:58:54 )I'd like to know when your mother got the message, what it said, and who sent it, if you can still find it. It sounds a bit like the shock tactics some anti-abortion lobbyists used to use.Ironically, cloning could be used to restart a pregnancy. The stem cells that most governments allow for use today come from aborted fetuses, but the cells are still alive. As far as I know, a stem cell can be placed inside an egg and become an embryo again. Normally, an blastocyst gets only one chance to grow into a baby, but cloning could allow as many chances as the parents wanted to take advantage of.A common and misleading expression used in cloning discussions is that cloning "destroys an embryo." To me, this makes it sound like somebody takes a ray gun and disintegrates the embryo just for the evil fun of it. "Destruction," as I usually think of the word, implies irreversibility; when I hear that something is destroyed, I assume it can't be brought back. However, when stem cells are extracted from an blastocyst, the stem cells aren't wiped out of existence; they still retain the potential to grow into any other cell or even an entire human being.What's even stranger is that people are against cloning because it "destoys an embryo" or "destroys a baby" (actually, the best time to isolate stem cells is at the blastocyst stage, when they have developed into a clump of about 100 cells) are also against "creating" a baby by cloning. This poses some problems. According to their principles, if an embryo or fetus has been aborted, that's wrong, but it's also wrong to use cloning to right that wrong. Also, every embryo supposedly has the right to grow into a baby and eventually an adult, so although they are against cloning, once it were done, they would be morally obligated to see to it that the blastocyst could grow into an embryo, baby, child, and so on.Very few people are ever likely to approve of harvesting an organ from one person and putting it into another if any reasonable alternative is available. People are so repulsed by the idea, in fact, that many people can't bear to part with their organs even after they're dead, and don't sign organ donation cards. This means that there's a perpetual shortage of organs for transplants, and a great interest in using stem cells either to strengthen organs so that they don't wear out in the first place or to grow individual organs (but on their own, not within a person marked for death).Taking organs from one person to put into another is something that has happened and continues to happen, however. I've read about organs being taken from condemned prisoners in China, and poor women in India selling their kidneys. There is a market in human body parts in the world today, something that cloning could help bring to an end. Banning cloning is the best way to make sure that people will continue to take organs out of one person and put them into another.The idea of babies being cloned and then killed for organs is a horror story, I think, because there is no proven case of human cells living beyond the blastocyst stage after cloning, and because any baby, no matter how it was conceived, would not be a good source of replacement organs for an adult.
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