Cloning and the law in Britain

Authors Avatar

Cloning

The law in Britain currently states that cloning a human is illegal. Should scientists be allowed to clone a human? That question opens up hundreds of ethical questions.  Here are some of the arguments for cloning.

No harm is being done. Creating a child doesn’t harm anyone; after all, procreation creates a child.

It could replace a child who had been lost under tragic circumstances.

Infertile couples could have a biological child.

In the event of a global disaster our species could be saved.

Clones already exist, they are called twins.

Here are some of the arguments against.

Cloning turns people into replaceable products.

Having children is not a right.

Abuse of technology in the wrong hands.

A sense of uniqueness or individuality has been denied.

Emotional risks to the clone.

Health risks to the clone and carrier.

After looking at lots of for and against arguments I was left with a lot of conflicting emotions. If you were to reproduce a dead child how would the clone feel knowing that it had been born as a replacement? Or imagine a clone being created in your partner’s image. What would the implications be when the clone reached the age that your partner was when you met them. Even though you had brought that clone up as your child you could have a sexual relationship with it because technically it is your partner’s twin. This could be where the human was turned into an expendable product. Couple the knowledge of cloning with the advancement of genetic engineering and eventually we could fulfil Hitler’s dream of a master race. Scientists are close to identifying the gene that determines your IQ so you could create a clone of yourself that is more intelligent, or had blue eyes as well. On the matter of individuality the clone would still be unique in its thought processes as personality and thoughts are not genetic but learnt. The thing that concerned me most was the possibility of breeding a superior, dispensable army but after researching this I realised that it is equally possible to do this without cloning and so far this hasn’t happened. A clone would still be able to think for itself, so is no more susceptible to indoctrination than a non clone. Once cloning has been perfected there would be no more risk to the health of the mother or clone than if it had been conceived through IVF. At the moment though, there is considerable risk of abnormalities in birth and in the USA 4 out of 12 impregnated cows died from pregnancy complications. When scientists created Dolly it took 277 attempts to reach success. Some pro lifers would put this at an unacceptable failure rate.

Join now!

Current legislation in the UK allows scientists to research therapeutic cloning (with an aim to growing organs) and animal cloning. It is inevitable that eventually we will have the technology to clone a human, as the more the scientist experiment with therapeutic cloning (the pre-embryo must be less than 14 days old) the closer they will get to find the answers to creating a viable, implantable embryo. With this in mind I think that the scientists involved would have different responsibilities than they currently do. Cloning a human involves creating a life, a human being who can think for ...

This is a preview of the whole essay