Pre-Mature Decision Millions of people pour into movie theatres every weekend to view movies about sports, romance, politics, and Science Fiction. While most of these movies are meant exclusively for entertainment, occasionally people will leave a theatre believing what they had viewed. Science fiction movies do this very well, especially when it comes to the topic of cloning. These movies from time to time have involved cloning machines, where a character walks into the machine and out he comes along with his clone. This might have made the movie enjoyable, but have put the idea of cloning in a bad light. There are many reasons why the public fears cloning, however, most fears are unsupported.
People are afraid of cloning just as they are afraid of anything new in their lives. This immature fear led congressional representatives to an immediate ban of all research and practice of cloning. Cloning should have never been banned, the action taken was inappropriate and had absolutely no factual reasoning. The statement that ‘Humans are not guinea pigs’ is one of the most common claims made by those who oppose cloning.
However, in all morally relevant respects, this is not true. Every one of us is an experiment; a result of a couple of people getting together in the back of a car, a hotel room, or some dark and secluded part of the house, throwing together the ingredients that created us. In many cases, the people who created us may not have even wanted to form a person by their actions, though they did. In this respect, clones will be far further from being guinea pigs than most people who are conceived through traditional methods. Which means that if the cry ‘humans are not guinea pigs’ really has some sort of moral force, it would argue for prohibiting traditional reproduction long before it will have any applicability to cloning (Fyfe par. 26-30).
Another very common fear is that cloning will be used to create armies or slaves. Armies and slaves can be created faster and more cheaply by other means than cloning. This fear of a “2 nd Holocaust” is very frivolous. It is unlikely that clones will ever be mass-produced as some people fear. Women would have to go through having to bear them, not mentioning that someone also has to raise them. This is an important point that much discussion about cloning overlooks.
In addition, a common claim is that wealthy people will clone themselves to have organ banks of ‘spare parts’ in case they need hearts or livers. These clones could be made without heads, so they could be killed for organs without committing murder. It is very obvious to most people that using another person for ‘spare parts’ is murder and should be prosecuted as such. Clones would be undeniably real people. Making ‘headless clones’ to supply organs would also be murder. It would require de cerebrating (removing the brain) of a fetus or infant.
Since the fetus or infant falls under the same legal and ethical rules as a non-cloned fetus or infant, whoever performed this would be prosecuted. Furthermore, there is no need to create an entire human, because individual tissues or organs could be grown. Another common but absurd argument is that people will abandon sexual reproduction in favor of cloning. Not even human cloning will eliminate the human desire to mate with another human (Oscategui par.
9). In addition, Most couples prefer a child related to both, not one. People worry that hey may be cloned secretly, against their will. It is true that blood taken for medical purposes or hair left at the barbershop could be stolen.
As a solution laws are necessary to prevent this by requiring the consent of any person who is cloned (or of the parents, if the individual is a child). This would be regulated by laws that would be put into place, but is no reason why cloning should be banned. Also there really is no practical reason why someone would be cloned by a complete stranger. Another common complaint is that cloning could reduce human diversity, especially if carried out on a large scale.
This is unlikely with humans, though it could occur with domestic animals. Most people want to have children who are the biological offspring of both or at least one parent, not the clone of some famous individual. Mass cloning of famous or wealthy individuals who want to populate the earth could be prevented by regulations that would stipulate that the number of cloned children could not exceed the maximum that would ordinarily survive in nature, probably five (quintuplets) or the number now allowed by most sperm banks (ten). The experience of sperm banks suggests that most people do not want the children of famous people, but want healthy children who are like themselves As you can tell, with these contradictions, many of the fears that congressional representatives attempted to alleviate by banning cloning, were completely unwarranted. These fears lead them to a hasty outlawing of any and all practices involving cloning.
These several misconceptions helped lead these congressmen to believe something that could not be farther from the truth. If these qualms were dealt with consideration, the congressmen would not have banned cloning just simply put forth some laws regulating it. Who is to say what will happen in the future, but everyone must realize that cloning will play a big role in that future. MLA Citations Fyfe, Alonzo. Against a Prohibition on Cloning. Reproductive Cloning Network.
7 March 2002. Oscategui, Patricia. Human Cloning vs. Natural Child Birth. New York University. 3 March 2002.
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