THE SLIPPERY SLOPE TO LIVE-BIRTH CLONING AND FETUS FARMING

Cloning for research will perfect the technique needed for cloning for live-birth and for fetal organ harvesting. While this will remain illegal, for now, in Australia , live-birth cloning is being attempted overseas and cloned-fetus farming is being promoted in major journals. Further abuses of this sort can only occur if we permit and perfect the first steps in cloning.

It is not responsible to dismiss ‘slippery slope’ arguments as ‘scare-mongering’. The phenomenon of stepwise progression towards a previously unthinkable state of affairs is a commonplace in human history.

This phenomenon is described by Robert Manne as “a slow and subtle transformation of ethical sensibility. Over time we become blind to how we once thought and what we once valued. We become accustomed or attracted to thoughts we would once have found unthinkable.”

In four short years, Senator Patterson has ‘become accustomed or attracted to’ thoughts of therapeutic cloning, which in 2002 she found unthinkable – see the last Blog. Now she is indignant at any thought that her Bill is preparing the way for live-birth cloning – which in her fickle sort of way she currently finds ‘unthinkable’.

Why should her earnest moral rejection of live-birth cloning be taken seriously, given her merry slide in the last 4 years down the preceding stage of the slippery slope?

Let’s face reality: there are already scientists and ethicists defending ‘live-birth’ cloning, and one scientist in the US who has published the claim to have a cloned embryo in the fridge waiting for a surrogate womb.

On the science of live-birth cloning, no less an authority than the American Society for Reproductive Medicine has pointed to the obvious logic of ‘therapeutic’ cloning techniques (SCNT) facilitating later ‘reproductive’ techniques:

“If undertaken, the development of SCNT for such therapeutic purposes, in which embryos are not transferred for pregnancy, is likely to produce knowledge that could be used to achieve reproductive SCNT.” [i]

And on the ‘ethics’ of live-birth cloning, as recently as this year, a Melbourne scientist, D Elsner, wrote in the Journal of Medical Ethics in support of the right to live-birth cloning (which he calls HRC: Human Reproductive Cloning):

“Several scientists have been outspoken in their intent to pursue HRC… A model to be used to determine when it is acceptable to use HRC and other new assisted reproductive technologies, balancing reproductive freedom and safety concerns, is proposed. Justifications underpinning potential applications of HRC are discussed, and it is determined that these are highly analogous to rationalisations used to justify IVF treatment. It is concluded that people wishing to conceive using HRC should have a prima facie negative right to do so.”

Senator Patterson can make all the hand-on-heart assertions she likes that her Bill is not going to further the cause of ‘reproductive’ cloning: her Bill is exactly what is required by those already further down the slippery slope, who do not find ‘reproductive’ cloning unthinkable at all, and who need the OK to perfect the technique of SCNT cloning.

But much worse than live-birth cloning, there are scientists and ethicists defending ‘fetus farming’ - the plan to grow cloned embryos to the fetal stage where we can butcher them for organs for transplant.

Oxford Professor Julian Savulescu has argued that we not only have a duty to clone, but to grow the clones until they are big enough to kill and harvest organs from to overcome the shortage of organ transplant tissue:

“The most publicly justifiable application of human cloning, if there is one at all, is to provide self-compatible cells or tissues for medical use, especially transplantation. Some have argued that this raises no new ethical issues above those raised by any form of embryo experimentation. I argue that this research is less morally problematic than other embryo research. Indeed, it is not merely morally permissible but morally required that we employ cloning to produce embryos or fetuses for the sake of providing cells, tissues or even organs for therapy, followed by abortion of the embryo or fetus.”
Should we clone human beings? Cloning as a source of tissue for transplantation. Julian Savulescu. Journal of Medical Ethics 25.2 (April 1999): p87.

And Dr Stuart Newman, professor of cell biology and anatomy, New York Medical College, predicted this outcome – the inevitable demand for more offensive experimentation, once the earlier abuses are safely legislated for - before the US Senate Subcommittee on Health, 3/5/2002

“Cloning embryos for producing embryo stem cells will, by failing to deliver on its promises, inevitably lead to calls to extend the life span of clonal embryos so as to permit harvesting developmentally more advanced cells and tissue for research and potential therapies… And once stem cell harvesting from two-month clonal embryos is in place, who could resist the pleas to extend the time frame so that liver and bone marrow could be obtained from six-month clonal fetuses? …This is my prediction… frustration over lack of progress in producing safe and effective therapeutics from embryo stem cells will lead to calls to permit harvesting of embryo germ cells from two to three month clonal embryos…”

And the practical experiments of cloned-fetus farming are being done in animal models – not out of tender concern for the animals’ health and quality of life, but as a model for human cloned-fetus farming.

So in July last year the director of Advanced Cell Technology, Robert Lanza, successfully cloned cow fetuses and aborted them to obtain differentiated liver tissue.[ii] In a press release, Lanza hailed this technology, expressing hope that it would be used “in the future to treat patients with diverse diseases”. He doesn’t mean pet cows, but human patients, therefore needing human cloned fetuses to be created and killed for their organs.

Given that Senator Patterson’s Bill allows for the harvesting of ‘precursor’ cells from aborted fetuses in order to create embryos who will themselves be destroyed in research, is her proposal really much less macabre than the proposal of fetus farming? Allowing an aborted baby girl to be the mother of a cloned embryo who will itself be exploited and destroyed in the lab.

Any Bill that gives the green light to cloning is culpable not only for the intrinsic offense of creating human embryos solely for research, but for making possible these subsequent vicious violations of our humanity.

But no worries: by that time, after a further transformation of sensibility, we will have become ‘accustomed or attracted to thoughts we would once have found unthinkable’. We will have become even less human.

This is our future, if we in Australia support the first steps in human cloning. This generation of legislators would be held responsible for lifting that lid on Pandora’s Box, allowing hideous and inhuman things to come out – or keeping it closed.


[i] American Society for Reproductive Medicine Ethics Committee; "Human somatic cell nuclear transfer (cloning)"; Fertility and Sterility 74, 873-876; November 2000

[ii] Robert Lanza et al., "Long-Term Bovine Hematopoietic Engraftment with Clone-Derived Stem Cells," Cloning and Stem Cells 7 (June 2005): 95-106.