The slippery slope to reproductive cloning

And the American Society for Reproductive Medicine makes the obvious point that perfecting the technique of “therapeutic” cloning makes “reproductive” cloning possible: “If undertaken, the development of SCNT (cloning) for such therapeutic purposes, in which embryos are not transferred for pregnancy, is likely to produce knowledge that could be used to achieve reproductive SCNT.”

Let’s face reality: there are already scientists competing to be the first to clone a baby. All they need is for clever countries like Australia to show them how to do it.

But much worse than live-birth cloning, there are scientists and ethicists defending “fetus farming” - the plan to grow cloned embryos to the fetal stage where we can extract their organs for transplant.

In an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics entitled “Cloning as a source of tissue for transplantation”, Melbourne ethicist Professor Julian Savulescu argues that we must clone and kill unborn babies to solve the organ transplant shortage: “Indeed, it is not merely morally permissible but morally required that we employ cloning to produce embryos or fetuses for the sake of providing cells, tissues or even organs for therapy, followed by abortion of the embryo or fetus.”

And practical experiments to harvest tissues or organs from the cloned fetus are being done in animal models - not out of tender concern for the animal’s wellbeing, but as a model for human cloned fetus farming.

So in July last year the American company Advanced Cell Technology successfully cloned cow fetuses and aborted them to obtain liver tissue. Director Robert Lanza expressed hope that this technique would be used “in the future to treat patients with diverse diseases”. He doesn’t mean cow patients, but human patients, therefore needing human cloned fetuses to be created and killed for their organs.

Given that Senator Patterson’s Bill allows, among other obscenities, for the tissues of an aborted baby girl to be used to make a cloned embryo which will itself be destroyed in the lab, is it really so far from her proposal to that of Professor Savulescu’s?

A Bill that gives the green light to cloning is culpable not only for the intrinsic offence of creating human embryos solely for research, but for making possible these subsequent horrors.

Cloning not only violates our humanity at the deepest level - making human procreation no longer human, creating a laboratory class of human young with no mother to protect them - but it dulls our conscience in preparation for the next desecration.

So by the time the next review of our cloning laws takes place, and scientists come asking for live-birth cloning and fetal farming, we may not care. After a further subtle transformation of ethical sensibility, we will have become “accustomed to thoughts we would once have found unthinkable”.

Science, which should serve our humanity, will have made us all less human.