Imagine you are born as a replacement. Your parents look at you and see your dead brother. Do you only have his body or maybe even his name? Who would you be? Or imagine you look exactly like your mother. Because you have the same genes, the same looks, maybe even similar character traits? Who would you be? A clone. That is the only simple and clear answer to the question. The rest would turn out to be much more complicated.
Imagine you grow older and turn out to be different. Not as gifted as your dead brother, not a genius, just a bad copy. What would you feel?
Or imagine you are an adult, the exact counterpart of your mother and your father looks at you and cannot help thinking of the woman he fell in love with. What would you feel?
Confusion. That is the one main feeling human cloning causes wherever it appears. There are various reasons for this, surely much of it is due to the general uncertainty about moral values in today’s society and even more important the completely unprecedented nature of the problem.Until the possibility of cloning was discovered the individuality of a human being has not been seriously doubted. Now it seems we even have to find a new definition for the word. What does individuality mean? What does it mean to be a human being? It cannot only mean to have a unique DNA because as a matter of fact identical twins who are born as naturally as anyone else have the same DNA. That would be far too simple.
It is the same for human cloning. The process of cloning may be all about DNA but its meaning for mankind is definitely not. All the discussions and controversies, the strong approval and even stronger rejection is not caused by the thought of having your genes copied. It is caused by the strange feeling most people have when they hear the word “clone”. Influenced by science fiction it has a pejorative connotation for us. We intuitively feel it is not exactly the same as “human being”. It sounds like a copy and the word implies that there is an original somewhere.
No, the discussion is not about genes. It is about having a place in life. There we find the great difference between twins and clones. Twins do have their own place in life, they have their parents, their environment, they are born at the same time, there is neither an original nor a copy. They grow up like normal children.
A clone does not. For his place is much less natural than that of an average child. If for example his parents had his elder brother or sister cloned because they died too early, then he is a kind of replacement for them. And that is also true for other people who know the family and recognize how much he resembles the other child. The relationship between him and his parents will always be different because of this knowledge. How will this influence his life? Negatively, that is almost sure. He will be compared and will compare himself to a ghost, to someone he never knew himself but who nevertheless rules his life forever.
And even if the original is not dead but one of the parents, there are still complicated feelings and relationships involved. The other parent for example who sees the one he once fell in love with standing before him or the divorced partner who has to face a copy of the person he does not love anymore and who maybe even hurt and betrayed him. And even people who are no relatives or friends but know and do not like the cloned person, how will they feel about the clone? Our sympathies towards others are linked with the outward appearance, too, and if someone resembles a person we detest, can we force ourselves to accept that the clone is a completely different person? Theoretically, yes, but feelings are not so easily overcome by rational thought.
Would we as human beings want to live such a life? No, we would certainly not. And in the name of humanity we should not force it on anyone else because every human being is born with an individual soul and therefore should be allowed to start a new life that is his own without the life of someone else as a legacy.
Unfortunately that is not what people have in mind when they are desperate because they know that they cannot have a child of their own or when they lost a loved one and long to have that person back.And of course we understand them. We have to understand them because what they feel is human, it is actually those very feelings that, even if they hurt, characterize us as human beings.Nonetheless we should not let those feelings blind us. If a mother tried to kill the murderer of her child we would understand her feelings, too, we would also call them human. But still we cannot allow her to do it because it is against everything we believe in.For cloning it is the same: We understand the parents but still we must not fulfill their desire because it would harm another human being, the clone. And in most cases it is the parents, too, who will have to face another disappointment when they have to accept that rebirth does not exist and that the child they have is a completely different person who does not make their grief vanish at all.
It may be hard to reject such a desperate wish especially because we tend to believe that people know what is best for them in their situation while they maybe do not know anything but just hold on to every little chance there is. Sometimes it seems mankind must be protected from what they want.
There is a whole lot of dangers in human cloning, the mass of fetuses killed during the procedure, the uncertainty about the clone’s physical condition, the market for women from poor countries as cheap surrogate mothers and the stagnation in evolution that would probably make us vulnerable to diseases are only some.But they count very little compared to the first fact we should take into consideration: The right of every human being to be individual and live his own life, not the life of anyone else.
The dead cannot be raised, not even by the most brilliant genetic engineers, and we should not fool ourselves with cheap tricks.
And what if it turns out we were wrong about rebirth the whole time? Honestly, if you found yourself crawling through your next life as a cockroach, would you like to cross some idiot who decorated what once was your face with a snaky tattoo?
© Lea Hartwich, 2009
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