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Illegal Beings: Human Clones
CLONING ACTIVIST COMMENTARY ON KOREA
Randolfe ( 02/13/2004, 10:45:32 )The successful creation of 30 blastocysts using human eggs, which was reported in the journal Science, February 13, 2004, proves the cloning of human beings is possible. Publishing explicit details of the technique, which produced blastocysts 26% of the time, makes the birth of a child conceived through cloning inevitable. Now that the way to achieve this is known, nothing can prevent human reproductive cloning from occurring in the near future. Therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning are two sides of the same technological coin. The rhetoric of those opposed to all cloning which defines the entire debate in terms of reproductive cloning and the failure of therapeutic cloning advocates to answer that rhetoric with sensible proposals for regulation of this technology threatens to undermine America’s leadership role in both science and medicine. The fact that South Korean researchers could get 16 women to donate 242 eggs without payment while American researchers have to go through long and arduous ethical debates which result in the payment of $4000 to each woman donating eggs reveals a fatally skewered process. Why did a system of “personal contacts”, without advertising or payment, give scientists in South Korea resources that would have placed a $64,000 additional burden on their American counterparts? The answer is part social, part political and part legal. Denise Owens, the mother of a child suffering from juvenile onset diabetes, wanted to donate eggs hoping a resulting cloned blastocyst could be used to create a stem cell therapy for her daughter. Both she and I contacted Advanced Cell Technology offering her eggs free of charge. Our repeated phone calls and emails were simply ignored. I confronted Dr. Ronald Green, the unpaid head of the bioethics advisory board for Advanced Cell Technology, about this at a cloning conference sponsored by the New York Bar Association on October 8, 2002. American egg donors are paid so that they have no property rights in any resulting medical discoveries or treatments. Litigious barriers prevent American researchers from tapping into those resources offered by volunteers that were central to the success at Seoul National University. Those legal barriers must be removed. They simply retard progress. Social conservatives in the Republican Party are currently giving political muscle to legislative proposals which would not only outlaw both therapeutic and reproductive cloning but which would also subject any physician who imported a stem cell therapy to treat a patient to prosecution, fine and imprisonment. Two times legislation totally banning cloning technology has passed in the House of Representatives. However, the passing margin shrank significantly the second time around. Activist groups like the Juvenile Diabetes Association have sent hundreds of volunteers to the offices of their Congressmen demanding therapeutic cloning and stem cell therapies be allowed to continue. Christopher Reeve and Michael J. Fox have used their celebrity profiles to publicize Congressional hearings and to bring additional pressure on wavering legislators. However, it has been the U.S. Senate that has effectively stopped all three efforts to criminalize cloning, in 1998, 2001 and 2003. While legislators debated and mainstream ethicists pondered cloning in general, the debate in the public square was monopolized by Right-to-Life activists on one side and the Raelians, a religious group claiming repeated cloning successes without ever producing a child, Drs. Antinori and Zavos, internationally known fertility specialists who made possibly credible claims of having created cloned pregnancies but who also failed to produce proof, and a small band of reproductive cloning activists who, although well informed, were only periodically heard in the frenzied media coverage. The latest developments in Korea change the parameters of this debate. Bioethicists who have supported therapeutic cloning while dismissing reproductive cloning as either impossible or a remote future possibility now confront a new reality. Women who want to clone themselves and bear a later-born twin are one of the three most passionate groups embracing cloning as one of their reproductive rights. (The other two are infertile couples and parents who want to clone deceased children.) Few doubt the right of single women to choose to bear and raise children. Now, these women can do so without involving the genes of a stranger. Cloning now makes “single parenthood” a reproductive option for those women desiring it. “Leon R. Kass, chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, called for federal legislation to stop human cloning for any purpose.” The New York Times reported in a front-page article by Gina Kolata on February 12, 2004. “The age of human cloning has apparently arrived: today, cloned blastocysts for research, tomorrow cloned blastocysts for babymaking.” For once, Leon Kass is absolutely right. Cloning as a reproductive option, foreseen favorably by Princeton’s Dr. Lee Silver in Remaking Eden and negatively critiqued by legal scholar Lori Andrews in The Clone Age has indisputably arrived. Randolfe H. Wicker The World’s First Human Cloning Activist Founder, Clone Rights United Front, www.clonerights.com Spokesperson, Reproductive Cloning Network, www.reproductivecloning.net Email: rhwicker@optonline.net Phone: 201-656-3280
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