Advantages of human reproductive cloning
People came up with various ideas of how cloning could be useful. We could clone genius-es like Einstein or Newton, so that they can boost the progress of science again (Brock, 1999). Or we could just replace loved ones who died, such that we do not have to suffer from our loss. But there are many problems with fictions like these, one of them being that there is no genetic determinism. Although much more could be said, I will just address one of the potential applications in more detail. That is the one which I judge to be the most important one: enabling reproduction for infertile patients with a biological connection to the child. Research in medicine has discovered many opportunities which can help infertile patients who wish to have children. However, there is no technique which is able to achie-ve a biological connection of infertile patients to their children (Brock, 1999). This is exactly the place where human reproductive cloning could fit in and offer new opportunities. In fact, it seems that many people have the wish for this kind of connection to their children. In many cases, people tend to argue for this wish on a purely emotional basis, without being able to really articulate some underlying reasons. In order to analyse the moral signi-ficance of this phenomenon, we have to consider the nature of this feeling as well as the consequences it would trigger.
Where does this feeling come from? To answer this question, evolutionary explana-tions have been considered. In a nutshell, the theory of evolution through natural selection tells us that we are driven by the desire to survive and to spread our genes. But infertile people can not spread their genes in a natural way. Nevertheless, it could be argued that they still have this kind of desire hard-wired in their brains, and with cloning there is a way to achieve this very efficiently.
What kind of consequences do we have to expect if this really were the result of our evolutionary history? If this feeling would be intense and stable on a long-term basis, we might expect that genetic parents will provide better care for children than non-genetic parents (Levy & Lotz, 2005). But in my opinion, there is reason to doubt this. It seems to me that this feeling should be categorised as a rapid emotional response, which may be intense on a spontaneous basis, but will not stay present on a long-term scale. I do not think that non-genetic parents are constantly haunted by the thought that their child does not belong to them – rather, I expect that they learn to love their child in just the same way like genetic parents do. Although there are studies which show increased numbers of sexual abuse for non-genetic parents compared to genetic parents, this does not mean that this holds in principle – cross-cultural studies show that there are cultures in which the biological connection to the child is not valued at all (Levy & Lotz, 2005). Hence, it is inadequate to conclude that the lack of a feeling of biological connection is sufficient to infer that the parents will not provide good care for the children.
From this analysis alone, one may conclude that we should still give parents the option of cloning – it does not seem to matter whether their children are cloned or not, they pro-bably would care for them in an equally good way. However, there are reasons which speak against this perspective: If infertile parents were given the possibility to clone their child, one major motivation for adopting children would be gone (Levy & Lotz, 2005). This would lead to an increased number of orphans and thus cause harm. Therefore, I do not believe that there is a reasonable application of human cloning, which would actually achieve clear advantages without significant disadvantages.