Missouri Right to Life Policy on Human Cloning

Policy

Missouri Right to Life is opposed to human cloning.

Explanation

At the time of this writing (September, 2009), the only successful method of cloning humans has been somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). However, the principles involved do not depend on the exact procedure that is utilized. Therefore, “cloning” is used in a broader sense, with the meaning that was used by the President’s Council on Bioethics in 2002:

In the sense relevant here, “cloning” is a form of asexual reproduction (parthenogenesis is another), the production of a new individual not by the chance union of egg and sperm but by some form of replication of the genetic makeup of a single existing or previously existing individual. (In biological or functional terms, the core of sexual reproduction is not bodily intercourse but the fusion of male and female germ cells; thus IVF, though it takes place outside the body, is—biologically speaking—a form of sexual reproduction.)

Cloning is the activity of producing a clone, an individual or group of individuals genetically virtually identical to the precursor that is being “replicated.”

President’s Council on Bioethics, Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry, pp. 42-43 (July, 2002) (internal footnotes omitted).

Human cloning is an abuse of human rights. There is no intent on the part of those who engage in cloning to allow the human beings produced by cloning to live. This would be what the cloners condemn as “reproductive cloning.” Rather, the intent of the cloners is to end the lives of human beings produced by cloning after harvesting stem cells from them or performing some other experimental research on them. This is exploitation of helpless young human beings for the benefit of other human beings, and it is wrong. To destroy young human beings for their cells, tissues, or organs is nothing but medical cannibalism. Because this is what cloning represents in current practice, Missouri Right to Life opposes it.