Human Dolly, the famous cloned sheep, has sparked much more than "three bags full" of controversy. Since the announcement February 22, 1997 that a Scottish scientist had successfully generated Dolly from another adult sheep, a new door has been opened for science. As with all technological and scientific developments, cloning has ethical and religious repercussions. Debate rages among politicians, theologians, philosophers and lawyers as well as scientists. The possibility of cloning, once a far-fetched, frightening idea, now seems all too real and threatening. Although the production of Dolly does not necessarily mean the cloning of other animals or even human beings is imminent, it is a critical step towards that technology. Cloning has been heralded as the great liberator from illness, disease, and genetically caused ailments. Yet the advancement of the technology necessary to clone individual human beings demands at once that we deny the very foundations of our dignity and freedom. Implicit within the argument in favor of cloning is the denial between the human and the divine, the natural and the supernatural. Every human person, we are told in Scripture, has been created in the image and likeness of God, destined for a full and perfect life with God. The universal claim binds each and every person to one God, creator and source of life. Human life can be understood only in context of its source. The natural conception of a human person thus possesses a supernatural dignity. Understood as such, the freedom hoped for in cloning human beings may not be so liberating after all. Man cannot be free apart from his nature. Cloning is an artificial generation of life and can only hinder true freedom. Cloning attempts to separate life from its God given origin and family from the natural love of a man and woman. John Paul II reminds us that "the family will always remain, in accordance with God's plan, the 'sanctuary of life'" (Evangelium Vitae, 6). Life is not a commodity or an experiment but a gift with inherent dignity and worth. Life is not just something to be protected from an unjust, unnatural end; life must also be protected from its very beginning, including the means of generation. The value of human life is not created or given by man, but by God, whose natural design for the transmission of life has an inviolable dignity itself. Not every technology should be pursued or
used. The possibility of cloning humans is best left unexplored and undeveloped
because it would violate the dignity of the cloned child, making him the artificial
product of a scientific procedure rather than the fruit of his parents' natural love and a
unique gift from God. Furthermore, cloning would violate the dignity of human
sexuality, the family, and society, by placing science above nature, man above God.
|
Cloning