I bet many of you have seen Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Multiplicity, or many of the other movies that describe cloning. Most of what you see in these movies is false. What you don’t know is that cloning could be dangerous, to the clone and to our society as a whole. It’s unethical to have a human clone. What about identity? Humans are guaranteed the right to their own personality. What would happen if we overrode those rights by giving them someone else’s genetic identity? True, personality is not bounded in someone’s genes, but the clone would share any physical appearance or genetic defect of the cloned.
Also, there is a large power struggle here. Cloning involves a degree of power and control over another person’s physical identity and that violates their rights and degrades their unique individuality. The person doing the cloning would have more power than any parent would have. Cloning would also deal with killing embryos. You might not have known, but Dolly, the sheep that was cloned in 1996, was one of over 200 sheep embryos and hers was the only embryo that survived.
The rest died or were thrown away. Imagine if the failure rate was that high when we started to clone humans. More than 200 embryos, the start of 200 human beings, would die for the sake of just one embryo that would have the same DNA as some one else. Cloning someone, at this present time, would be extremely dangerous to the birth mother and the clone. In studies done on cows, 4 out of 12 birth mothers died. There is also a very high abnormality rate for the clone.
There is a very high failure rate, which is showed in the cloning of Dolly. Even if you had a few good embryos, miscarriages have been prominent in animal tests. So, should we forge ahead in the world of cloning? I say no. The risks outweigh the benefits. It’s dangerous to the clone and to the birth mother. We would be killing innocent human lives in the process as well.
It would also be a violation of the clones right to its own genetic identity and individuality.