ARTICLES

Baby Cakes

Professor at Catholic University Promotes Reproductive Cloning

BY CHRISTOPHER ZEHNDER

Human clones are not "evil;" neither are they "unnatural, abnormal, strange, artificial, [or] inferior." In fact, human clones are cool -- and if we do not think so, then we are just bigots, lost in the mazes of unreasoning religious prejudice, nursery room morality, or just plain alarmism.

Of course, clones do not exist. But they may, and since they may, we must put aside any objections against, well, cloning. Such is the burden of the book, Illegal Beings, Human Clones and the Law, by Kerry Lynn Macintosh. A book of this sort is certainly not surprising in our day. But what may be surprising is that it comes from the pen (or type pad) of a professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law, a Jesuit and, purportedly, Catholic institution. This book, written as if for some Cloning Council ("Got Clones?"), not only advances the thesis that one should not object to cloning, but offers a legal strategy to offset any attempts to ban through law the production of humans clones.

Professor Macintosh seems profoundly interested in human cloning. According to her web page on the Santa Clara University law school site, she teaches a seminar course at the school which "will focus on cloning and genetic engineering: two emerging biotechnologies that challenge our understanding of what it means to be human." She has written a piece for the Santa Clara Journal of International Law, "Human clones and international human rights," and is working on a book, Human Cloning in the Stone Age. Judging by Illegal Beings, these endeavors are certainly pro-cloning -- not simply for therapeutic but for reproductive purposes as well.

Cloning, which Macintosh says is merely asexual reproduction, could be a boon, she says, for fertile men and women who carry genetic diseases, as well as "gay and lesbian couples [who] may find that cloning can give them children of their own without introducing the unwanted genes of a third-party sperm or egg donor." Further, opponents of human reproductive cloning should drop their opposition to it, says Macintosh, because, "if human cloning can be done safely and effectively, it cannot be stopped -- even if it is illegal." No one, she says, can stop the "biological drive to reproduce," for it is "a powerful one" and will be fulfilled by cloning if by nothing else. And, "if cloning is a crime, these individuals [the human clones] will endure a society that has attempted through its democratic institutions to prevent their very existence." They "will suffer from unfavorable stereotyping."

Macintosh does not rest with arguments from necessity, however; she goes on to refute the religious, moral, and utilitarian arguments against cloning. She first attacks what she apparently thinks is the only religious objection to cloning, simplifying it to "cloning offends God." Illegal Beings deals with this claim in short order. "It is impossible to know whether human reproductive cloning does, in fact, offend God," it says. And why? "For one thing," Macintosh continues, "there is no scientific proof that God exists. Furthermore, even if God does exist, there is no objective way to show what God thinks about cloning." According to Macintosh, "the only thing one can say with confidence is that many people believe that human reproductive cloning offends God." This is an unfortunate belief, for it "comes at a heavy price, for it holds the potential to harm humans who will be born through that technology."

Similar to the religious objection, says Macintosh is one held, purportedly, by environmentalists -- that cloning is "a kind of technological rape of Mother Nature. That which is 'natural' is good; that which is 'unnatural' is bad." Macintosh disposes of this argument with two swipes of her pen. "Biology," she says, "does not determine what is 'natural' -- cultural and moral values, which change over time, do." Society's experience with in-vitro fertilization proves this, for it suggests "that what we consider to be natural depends on how experienced and comfortable we are with a reproductive method rather than on how similar that method is to sexual intercourse." Cloning, says Macintosh, is merely asexual reproduction, and that "is not as contrary to nature as opponents assert," since "asexual reproduction is entirely natural for much of Earth life; it simply is not the way that humans have reproduced up until now.... Simple organisms reproduce asexually; traditionally, humans and other mammals have not."

Yes, traditionally. And, traditionally, humans have thought that there are certain moral truths that are unchanging and can be known. Macintosh rejects this. Addressing certain religious and secular moral objections to human cloning -- that cloning violates the idea that children are gifts of God and that it reflects a commodification of human beings -- she says, "moral arguments are hard to prove." And she continues: "there is no scientific proof that God exists, let alone that God views cloning as an offense to human dignity. Nor is it possible to prove that aversion to the application of marketplace norms in family matters reflects a superior morality. (For some, marketplace norms may be the most honorable and dependable norms of all.) Again, what we can say with certainty is that some people believe that cloning violates human dignity or are offended by what they consider to be the improper extension of marketplace norms." [Emphasis in original.]

Macintosh admits that religious people will say that their belief "is an objection to hubris rather than to a particular type of human." They may be opposed to cloning but they would not treat clones as subhuman. Still, says the professor, "the objection encourages the religious right to believe that human clones are evil. Similarly, the related objection that cloning is unnatural encourages the environmentalist left to conclude that human clones are unnatural, abnormal, strange, artificial, and inferior."

Illegal Beings deals with other objections to cloning -- that human clones would merely be the identical copy of the person who donated his or her nuclear DNA; that cloning would be used for eugenic goals (which, says Macintosh, is not "imminent" and "speculative at best"); that it harms participants and produces birth defects. However, none of these objections, for her, has any cogency. Macintosh then goes on to argue that proposed and enacted laws against reproductive cloning in the United States are based on the various objections to cloning she has discussed. Such laws are "antiegalitarian," she says, and would "devalue the humanity of infertile, disabled, and homosexual men and women."

The third part of her book stakes out what Macintosh calls "my most ambitious claim: anticloning laws are an unconstitutional violation of the equal protection guarantee." Such laws, she says, are not directed so much against the process of cloning as against the existence of clones -- something she calls "existential segregation." Illegal Beings then lays out strategies for overturning such laws. "Someday, if human clones are born," says Macintosh, "I hope my analysis will provide them with a strategy for bringing a constitutional challenge to the laws that oppress them."

I left messages with both Macintosh and with Santa Clara University president, the Jesuit Father Paul Locatelli. Neither responded to my requests for an interview. I had hoped Father Locatelli would explain how Macintosh's opinions were in line with Catholic teaching -- or at least why a Catholic university has such a teacher on staff. However, I had to content myself with a conversation with Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk, a neuroscientist as well as the director of education and staff ethicist for the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia.

As I expected, the Catholic teaching regarding reproductive cloning as presented by Father Pacholczyk is far more nuanced than the religious objections to cloning presented by Professor Macintosh. One of the reasons, said Pacholczyk, that the Church says reproductive cloning is immoral "is the same basic reason that in-vitro fertilization is immoral. In other words," he continued, "the process involves this conscious decision to replace the marital act between husband and wife with an action of laboratory manipulation via which you generate a new human. And that is always, intrinsically, a violation of the natural law -- of the way that we are meant to hand on the sacred gift of human life."

The fact that Macintosh sees reproductive cloning as just another reproductive alternative is "precisely the problem," said Father Pacholczyk. "The Church has always held that alternatives to the marital act cannot be used, because what the marital act itself does is safeguard the fact that each of us is the fruit of the love of two spouses -- of the bodily love of this total bodily self-donation between a man and a woman who are husband and wife and in this lifelong bond of marriage. So, as soon as you turn reproduction into a kind of project where its handled in the laboratory, it' s no longer the husband and wife but it is a laboratory technician who is stepping in and basically working as if he were putting together a recipe to make a cake; he's mixing sperm, he's mixing eggs, he's involved in what is an inherently a depersonalizing kind of procedure. It is a manufacturing procedure; its not a procedure of procreation. When it happens in the lab, it is not procreation but production."

An additional problem is that, with laboratory fertilization, any cell will do; it needn't belong to either one of the couple, married or not. Techniques such as cell and egg donation and surrogacy, said Pacholczyk, are "violations of exclusivity" between a married couple that manifest themselves in many different directions. Once you have, in effect, unleashed this entire set of forces, unbound it from the setting of marital intimacy, it just goes haywire, in multiple directions. Everyone denies that these slopes are slippery and they say, 'well, we can impose reasonable oversight. We can have control mechanisms.' They talk themselves into believing that."

An "added dimension" to reproductive cloning, said Pacholcyzk, "is that it represents a kind of eugenic tendency. What you are doing is not merely selecting some features that you would like your child to have, but are, in fact, choosing all of them. You're saying, 'I want my child to be an exact replica, an identical twin of person X over there, who's already been born. And this represents a kind of parental domination that is inappropriate, in fact, to the parental role."

I pointed out, however, that Macintosh in her book dismisses the eugenics argument against cloning, saying it is based on the "identity fallacy." According to the professor, cloning doesn't produce exact copies. "You can't make copies, that's biologically correct," said Pacholczyk, "but you do make identical twins. So that's clearly a form of imposing a phenotype on another individual. It's not a receptivity to the kind of variability that God has written into the marital act, where two spouses provide a unique combination that will then determine that future individual's characteristics on many levels."

There is a natural fittingness, a kind of sacrality, to the sexual act between a man and woman that is open to life. "The marital act represents the privileged and unique locus in which each of us is meant, not just to be brought into being, but genuinely loved into being." said Father Pacholczyk. "This is a point that is inherently violated whenever you start manipulating life in the laboratory. Then, of course, other options present themselves laterally, beyond the central ethical concern -- like freezing embryos, like testing embryos. Then, further down the line, you get into what is called selective reductions, where you implant three to five embryos, and if they all take, then you go down the path of aborting two or three of them, and the remainder will thrive. So there are many manifestations of the disordered tendency as soon as you begin to engage the idea that this should be done."

But such abortions should be of no ethical concern, according to Macintosh, since, she says, up to 75 percent of embryos conceived through sexual intercourse spontaneously miscarry. Sexual reproduction is, thus, at least almost as "hazardous to embryos and fetuses" as cloning techniques, according to Illegal Beings. (Despite this, Macintosh says, "no legislature has ever sought to outlaw sexual reproduction.... As a society, we tolerate an enormous number of embryonic and fetal deaths to protect the freedom of the individual to procreate."

Macintosh, said Pacholczyk, simply rehashes a very old argument, "that nature is inefficient, and therefore it is O.K. if you and I choose to do something that we know will be inefficient. In other words, this argument is trying to read out an intentionality from nature and derive a moral imperative, or at least a possibility of moral license. A parallel argument would be along these lines: mother nature sends tsunamis that claim 350,000 lives in one major event; therefore, it's okay for me to take a machine gun and go into a stadium and shoot into crowds. Mother Nature does it, I can do it. But it is a complete non sequitur. It is not a reasonable argument on any level at all. What Mother Nature may do, is up to Mother Nature. What God chooses to do is up to God. But what you and I can do, as free acting moral agents, is an entirely different arena that depends on very strong and direct considerations of objective goods that may or may not be violated by the actions that we contemplate."

The figure given for the number of spontaneous miscarriages, said Pacholczyk, varies. "The numbers I more often run into in the medical literature range between 40 and 60 percent of the embryos conceived that will not implant or will otherwise fail to come to term," he said. "But even if it were 99 percent, it wouldn't affect the fundamental question of praxis. So it's an irrelevant consideration."

Statistics are not the key to understanding the divine intention regarding human procreation. Rather, said Father Pacholczyk, this understanding "flows from something much deeper, a recognition of an inherent orientation, or telos [purpose], that is inscribed in the bodily structures of man and woman and in certain inter-orientations that characterize each of them when they bringing forth new life and propagate themselves. So it's a much more deeply rooted thing than trying to marshall some kind of raw statistical argument."

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