Cloning
Not that long ago, the term "clone" was known only to serious students of the biological sciences. Today, practically everyone has at least a general idea of what a clone is, and at least a foggy idea of how clones are formed. And many are aware that the Church has expressed grave reservations (to put it mildly) about the manufacture and use of clones - at least when applied to attempts to replicate the human animal. Why this opposition?
Before hitting that question head-on, let me remark that many folks have an uneasy feeling about the cloning of human material. The idea conjures up images of Dr. Frankenstein's lab; we get the feeling that we are playing in a neighborhood we shouldn't even be visiting. These feelings may have ample foundation. But they are not at the core of the Church's opposition.
What is at the core? The manufacture and use of clones treats the human person as a commodity. If we attempt to come up with a "designer human being" (after discarding prototypes which do not meet our specifications), we have cheapened life beyond measure. You can't go about tweaking the design and casting off the "rejects" without crossing a moral boundary. This is true even if there is some hoped-for research benefit in view. The Pontifical Academy for Life put it this way:
"Human dignity demands the recognition that a person is never to be treated merely as a means to another end. A cloning program may be aimed at the production of genetically engineered human beings, or may be undertaken to replicate genetically one particular human being. Doing this means subordinating such cloned beings to the purposes of others, for utility or satisfaction or even mere curiosity. Such a process is intrinsically wrong."
Another aspect of this is the manner in which clones are formed. The technical world is asexual, which means that the process does not include a father and a mother as in the "old-fashioned way." We learned from Humanae Vitae that it is wrong to separate the sexual act from the possibility of procreation. The same principle applies here.
To summarize: The Church opposes cloning because it treats the human being as a commodity. (By the way, that's the same reason slavery is wrong. For your nocturnal meditation, think for a while about that association.)
Deacon Greg Sampson
Diocese of Rochester
