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Illegal Beings: Human Clones
Re: School Debate
SC ( 12/02/2003, 07:33:27 )I hope you will follow up and tell us how your debate went. If society truly lived by the principles of medical ethics (it is good to prolong life and reduce suffering), there would be no cloning "debates" of the sort we usually witness. If it seems afterward that your teacher set up the discussion merely to discredit cloning, please let us know here, and your teacher can have a debate with us as to whether your project was assigned in an ethical fashion.There are several postings below in defense of human cloning, as well as an essays section elsewhere on this site. Information gathering is part of your assignment, and some of us don't want to duplicate previous postings, because requests like yours come in frequently. Libfemme, Randolfe, Anon Boards, and I have all posted in defense of human cloning, and I wrote one specifically about false debates, called "The Pro-Debate Camp." If you have one specific question you can't find an answer for after looking through the last four pages or so, post it here.Human cloning, if you've read Libfemme's posts, already takes place within the body. People produce a limited number of duplicate cells on their own. This is how the body sustains, reproduces, and heals itself. Unfortunately, the body doesn't make enough of these cells to keep working indefinitely. The aim of cloning is to produce enough of the same types of cells to fight aging, degenerative diseases, and infertility. It's tough to find reasons why human cloning "is a help" because it hasn't been done, or at least it hasn't been taken far enough to show results using cells produced in a lab. Medical treatments have been undertaken using the same sorts of cells that cloning aims to produce; adult stem cells have been successfully used to fight arthritis, strengthen hearts, treat Crohn's disease, and so on.The argument "It's wrong to do it because it hasn't been done" has been used against many technological advances in the past. The objections people have to cloning are not specific to cloning. Mostly they seem to be related to fear of change, fear of responsibility, perfectionism, lack of information about the subject, or, for want of a better word, depression. Virtually every medical advance, by definition, has to overcome this sort of resistance before it becomes accepted. For instance, doctors believed for hundreds of years that patients could be helped by bleeding them (removing blood), even when considerable evidence had accumulated to the contrary. The first doctor who tried putting blood into a patient couldn't prove that doing so would help the patient because no one had ever tried it, but the patient was about to die, so he tried it. As luck would have it, the first transfusion worked, and although other patients died before medicine learned about which blood types were compatible with which, millions of people's lives were saved and improved by that discovery and others which followed. In hindsight, the cost to society of not trying to do blood transfusions for all those years was enormous. With stem cells, we are looking at a similar procedure applied to other parts of the body, and with less potential for rejection than there was in the first blood transfusion, because the cells wouldn't be taken from other people.With any relatively untried medical procedure, a doctor has to weigh the potential rewards of the treatment against the cost of doing nothing (the cost of doing nothing is typically not considered by those who oppose cloning). The newest treatments are typically tried on patients who volunteer or who have little to lose. As more is learned about a treatment, its use is gradually extended to people who are healthier and less risk-averse.Insofar as cloning can be used as a treatment for disease or disability, the ethical issues are no different than for any other promising medical procedure. However, since cloning might be used to treat aging, or lead to other discoveries which would do so, the potential cost of doing nothing is higher than with other treatments which have being researched. In the past, a new discovery might give a patient a better chance of eventually dying of old age. Cloning gives a patient a better chance of never dying of old age.Sooner or later, we will all die of old age if something else doesn't kill us first. In addition, diseases which could be treated by the transplantation of cells account for about 50 per cent of all health care costs in the United States. Sooner or later, all of us will reach the point at which, if we wish to continue living a healthy life, it will be worth trying to use stem cells or their equivalent to do so. It's not a question of whether it is ethical to give the treatment a try. It's only a question of when.
This Message is being posted for educational purposes, as well as for comment and criticism, by the visitors to the HumanCloning.org Foundation website (www.HumanCloning.org ).
Disclaimer: Information provided on this web site is for educatonal purposes only. It is not a substitute for, nor can it replace advice from your own physician.
HumanCloning.org™ Established December 11, 2002.
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