Isn't it obvious? This is a CHILD, not a CHOICE!
Posted on 11/28/2001 2:26:58 AM PST by billorites
CLONING HUMAN embryos is wrong, as President George W. Bush said Tuesday. But why?
To be sure, advocates of human cloning use appealing arguments. Who doesn’t want to end disease and help people with failing organs? Their case for cloning is simple: breeding babies for the purpose of growing cells and tissue will advance the battle against all sorts of medical afflictions and allow for the stockpiling of replacement organs and body parts. But this argument ultimately falls short. In the end, the (more complex) argument against human cloning is the most compelling.
First and foremost, as the President said on Tuesday, “We should not as a society grow life to destroy it.” This simple but not simplistic statement is pregnant with deeper meaning.
Bush was saying that the creation of human life must remain an end in itself and not a means to satisfy our own selfish purposes. When human life is created, that new human being has its own individual moral worth that cannot be superseded by others’ desires for a more pleasant or painless life.
Those who support human cloning for medical purposes (such as U.S. Rep. Charles Bass) intellectually demote one category of human beings to the status of slaves. Their argument that we should breed humans for the sole purpose of “harvesting” their cells and organs is an argument that requires us to separate human life into two categories: those with intrinsic moral value and those with only utilitarian value.
This is precisely the same intellectual distinction made by slave traders to separate whites and blacks, Nazis to separate Gentiles and Jews, and Communists to separate true believers from “enemies of the revolution.” Kudos to Sen. Bob Smith, Sen. Judd Gregg and Rep. John E. Sununu for understanding this.
Do we really want American doctors to violate the Hippocratic oath and begin viewing some lives as more morally worthy than others? Whom will we designate to decide which lives have moral worth and which can be ended for the benefit of others? And how will we stop the concept from spreading into other contexts? If it’s morally justified to kill human embryos for scientific research, why is it morally wrong to kill babies, the retarded, the disabled or the permanently brain damaged for the same purposes?
This case against human cloning is not, as some cloning advocates have claimed, entirely a slippery slope argument. If we allow the intellectual separation of humans into these two categories, we will have already reached the bottom of the slope. From thence forward it’s only a matter of time before American scientists are farming humans (in embryonic form at first, but other forms later) for utilitarian purposes, as the Nazis did and the Chinese do.
Ending disease and having a plentiful supply of replacement organs are nice goals, but they can never justify the slaughter of living humans. Such creepy utilitarian arguments will only harm society in the long run as they will enable and even encourage us to view others as tools for satisfying our own needs. And other humans, including embryos, are not tools. They are humans with the same rights and moral worth as the rest of us. Humanity will never be the same should we as a society ever forget that.
Makes me wonder..... and changes the dynamic in a lot of ways.
Keeping 2 or 3 clones in a pen in the backyard for organ transplant purposes.
I bet the PETA people will have no problem with it.
Too late. We just publically funded the NIH, which is using an existing line of stem cells to research diseases. An existing line of stem cells is duplicated over and over so some claim that these aren't really body parts. But the fact remains tht the original line was ripped out of the bodies of human beings harvested [farmed] and then killed for no other purpose but to benefit those already living.
When we compromised on stem cells and called it victory, we shouldn't be surprised over cloning and other morally abhorrent things that spring up out of the part of the scientific community that is radically atheist.
These techniques, insofar as they involve the manipulation and destruction of human embryos, are not morally acceptable, even when their proposed goal is good in itself.
What is technically possible is not for that reason alone morally admissible.
Cloning technology is unlikely to result in the births of many cloned persons; no society so utterly consumed with its own wants is likely to be interested primarily in sharing the world with any new life. So even if we can set aside most of the Brave New World images of stultified servant classes, raised as property (though no doubt there will be an distasteful but lucrative trade in made-to order sex slaves, sterilised for both convenience's sake and to prevent accidental inbreeding) there remains the fact that the pulsing contents of many a test tube and petri dish will be held as property of the powerful.
We are an individual human being in the body first at conception and remain an individual human being in the body until death, artificially or naturally arrived at, along the continuum that is an individual human lifetime in the body begun at conception.
Slavery is unacceptable in an advanced civilization ... or is it? If it's enslavement for only a short time period, then harvest and kill the enslaved, is that okay?... They're only a few hundred cells.
You are too kind. They see it. A great many can no longer be reached by education, having so hardened their hearts that they comprehend perfectly what they are about, and no longer care.
Once you live in a society in which death is routinely advanced as a solution for all political problems, it's a snap to move from there to the personal sphere.
"War is hell," they chant to themselves over and over as they stride into the abortion mills.
They already do, each and every time they rip a baby out of the womb.
Uni trinoque Domino
Sit sempiterna gloria,
Qui vitam sine termino
Nobis donet in patria.
I can still hear the deep, mellow voice of a particular Christian Brother singing this Mass. It is one of my better memories of the Catholic Church. The sound of the song is the good memory. The meaning is a different story. It is so pleading. Sort of like a dog begging for a biscuit. If I were God hearing this I would tell him to go solve his own problem and stop being such a sycophant. (IMHO)
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