Why Cloning Really Matters
by Adam Reed
I am about to discuss a topic of intense personal self-interest. I am 59 years old. My father died at 73 from heart failure. I have another 14 years before I start living, by biological prediction, on borrowed time. I follow medical news, of advances in treatment of organ failure, as though my life depended on it. Because it does.
On 28-Oct-2004, the Medical Procedure News section of News-Medical.Net published an article under the title "Fetal tissue restores lost sight from retinitis pigmentosa." It started, "Three years ago Elisabeth Bryant believed she would be blind for the rest of her life." Two and a half years ago she received a transplant of a sheet of retinal cells from an aborted fetus. Her vision has improved from 20:800 to 20:84 since, and she can see well enough to read, play computer games and check emails.
Bryant was the first of six patients in whom the lost function of an important organ was restored with fetal organ transplants. Some people have a problem with this:
One accusation of those opposed to using fetal tissue is that women might be tempted to have abortions to provide tissue to restore their own sight or that of relatives. "People are going to claim that we are promoting abortion," says Norman Radtke, the surgeon who carried out the transplants at the Norton Audubon Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky. A few countries, such as the UK, already have clear guidelines to ensure this does not happen. "The guidelines are meant to prevent the deliberate conception and termination for treatment of a particular person," says Stephen Minger, head of the stem cell laboratory at King's College London.
In much of the world therapeutic cloning is banned because of the superstitious belief that embryos and fetuses -- even those without a developed brain -- are possessed of some ghostly version of a brainless, incorporeal consciousness. To the extent that any research on therapeutic cloning is permitted at all, it is permitted only to the point of collecting undifferentiated stem cells from a very early-stage embryo. Yet, as News-Medical notes, "the few attempts to treat degenerative eye diseases with stem cells in animals have failed, as have attempts to transplant unstructured groups of cells into the retina ... no one is anywhere near recreating the complex structure of the retina using stem cells."
Cloning is seldom mentioned in connection with the spectacular success of fetal retina transplants. Yet this proof-of-concept work bears heavily on the ethics of banning therapeutic cloning and the growing of cloned fetuses for transplants. The retina is literally the thinnest important organ in the human body. Because it is only a few cells thick, transplanting a retina from a genetically different fetus does not provoke the massive immune rejection that would greet a transplanted heart or liver or lung. Yet there is a natural way to prevent immune rejection from happening at all: grow a fetus from an embryo that was cloned from the patient for the express purpose of making organs for transplantation. For Homo sapiens, the animal that lives by the mind, there is surely nothing more natural than to use its intelligence to defeat death from organ failure.
We can now understand the perverse fear that free individuals blinded by retinitis pigmentosa, or their mothers or daughters or sisters, "might be tempted to have abortions to provide tissue to restore their own sight or that of relatives." If they were permitted to save their own sight, or the sight of a relative, they might get the idea of gestating a cloned fetus to save their own lives, or the lives of their relatives, from death by heart failure, by liver failure, by lung failure or by kidney failure. Hence therapeutic cloning -- even to save one's own life, or the life of a sibling or parent or child -- must be strictly prohibited by the authorities. If people are permitted to save their own lives, they might think that they individually, and not the state over them, are their own lives' proper owners. People in positions of power -- even if they themselves are free of superstitious beliefs about some ghostly consciousness in a brainless fetus -- cannot allow such a thing.
We do not know, at this point, to what stage of gestation, or post-gestation age, a fetus may need to be grown before a specific organ is harvested. However, unless the fetus becomes a conscious human, there is in objective ethics no conceivable problem with growing one to whatever stage is needed. As long as the fetus is surgically decorticated before its brain develops a capacity for consciousness, the fetus remains an artifact -- created by a free individual for a purpose of her choice -- and, having been decorticated, never becomes a person. So-called "ethical concerns" with therapeutic cloning are the politicians' mask -- an instrument for obtaining "popular assent" to mass murder.
Democide, as we know from history, does not require gas chambers or killing fields. It is enough to prevent the victims from doing what they would have done, if free, to continue their lives. In the great famine, Lenin murdered between 4 million and 9 million Ukrainian peasants by prohibiting, as contrary to Socialist Morality, the practice of trade in food. Through prohibiting what is required for men to keep on living, one can murder millions without the cost of gas or bullets or executioners. A less frequently discussed example is the current worldwide ban on DDT, by which some 50 million people have been murdered when denied the means to protect their lives from malaria. Let us calculate the dimensions of the democide that the ban on cloning amounts to.
In 2002 -- the most recent year for which government statistics are available -- 696,400 Americans died of heart failure, 124,770 of chronic lung failure, 73,247 of diabetes, 40,801 of kidney failure and 27,247 of liver failure. The total for these five is 762,465 deaths per year in the United States, out of a population of about 300 million. Half of the world's population, about 3 billion -- ten times the population of the United States -- live in countries advanced enough to use therapeutic cloning and fetal organ transplant technology if it were legal. The proportional estimate of death from failure of one of the above 5 major organs -- in advanced countries only -- is about 7.6 million. If only half of those deaths could be eventually prevented by application of cloning and fetal organ transplant technologies, then every year of delay in the development of those technologies results in 3.8 million preventable deaths. Therapeutic cloning was banned in the United States in July 2001. Shortly thereafter, under pressure from the Bush Administration, it was banned nearly everywhere around the world.
President Bush has promised to veto any repeal of the cloning ban as long as he remains in office. By the end of his presidency, the total number of people killed by the ban that delays medical research into human cloning will exceed 30 million. We are witnessing the third-largest democide in history.
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