Right to Live and Die: Ethics and Morality

Ethics and Morality: The Right to Live and Die

The Ethics of Human Cloning

The topic of human cloning came into the limelight in 1996, when Dolly the lamb was cloned by embryologist Ian Wilmut of Roslin Institute, Scotland. The American Medical Association (AMA) defines cloning as the "production of genetically-identical organisms via somatic cell nuclear transfer" (Fornsworth, 2001). Essentially, it is the production of a baby with the same genes as its monozygotic parent, and which basically involves inserting the parent's DNA into a nucleated egg and then chemically stimulating the egg to undergo cell division and become an embryo that is a complete genetic copy of its parent / DNA donor (Fornsworth, 2001).

Despite its inherent benefits, which include helping sterile couples get an offspring complete with either the father's or the mother's genetic make-up, and creating humans who can readily be organ donors for each other; cloning has faced large-scale opposition from religious experts, the medical fraternity, and the public as a whole. At the heart of this opposition are two ethical questions -- does a child born as a genetic duplicate of another person have the same rights and privileges as that person? Moreover, given the risks involved in the whole process, is it fair to subject an innocent soul to such high-risk procedures and such high probability of failure and deformation? These two ethical concerns have been expounded in the three areas of interest below.

Medical and Technical Safety: scientists place a reconstructed egg's chances of success at a dismal 1000:1 (Wordpress, 2009). As a matter of fact, the high safety risk at play has been the key reason why human cloning has been widely opposed by the public (Wordpress, 2009). The probability of a clone dying in the womb is 1000 times higher than that of them surviving; and even those that survive face high likelihoods of having birth defects that would eventually lead to death. Of even greater concern is that the mother/surrogate faces a high possibility of death, given that the Large Offspring Syndrome, which causes a clone to overgrow in the womb, is almost inevitable (Wordpress, 2009). Furthermore, clones face higher chances of early death, owing to the effect of orthopedic problems occasioned by the electric and chemical procedures involved in their creation (Wordpress, 2009). Dolly, for instance, died at the age of four -- six years below the average life expectancy of normal sheep.

Cloning Undermines the Concepts of Family and Reproduction: when cloned children join the family unit, they basically disrupt the normal physiological construction of the same. A key concern among sociologists and medical specialists is that cloning would impede on the conventional mating process because then everyone would want to have an exact duplicate of themselves; and not many people would be satisfied with contributing only half of their child's genetic make-up as is the case now (Wordpress, 2009).

The Possibility of Ambiguous Progenitor-Cloned Child Relationships: I tend to think that apart from the medical benefits, there perhaps is no other reason why someone would want to have a genetic duplicate of themselves. Nonetheless, is for argument's sake, one chooses to engage in cloning for medical reasons -- is it really fair for the clone? Doesn't he/she also have a say on whether they wish to donate whatever they were intended for? Doesn't a clone have the same rights and privileges as everyone else?