The author is Professor G. Pence, a lecturer on philosophy and medical ethics at the University of Alabama.  Gregory Pence is a bioethicist philosophically supportive of human cloning, once primate studies have shown it to be safe.  This excellent article satirizes some of the irrational reasons that have been proposed in opposition to reproductive human cloning.    The author can be contacted by email (pence@uab.edu).  See also: http://www.uab.edu/philosophy/faculty/pence/

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Future shifts reproduction to new level

By Gregory E. Pence 

Professor, Dept. of Philosophy & School of Medicine 
University of Alabama at Birmingham 
Author, Who's Afraid of Human Cloning? (1998) 

Our 22d century should not begin by abandoning our traditional way of creating babies: through cloning.

- Sen. Justus Greenback, Jan. 6, 2101


A proposal has come before the U.S. Senate in the year 2101 to allow Americans to begin creating children through sexual reproduction again. Sen. Greenback opposes this proposal to turn our backs on 100 years of safe, dependable cloning. Sen. Greenback is correct, and here's why:

1. Human sexual reproduction (HSR) produces unwanted children. Unless we take great care in having sex, children result. Neither planned nor wanted, such children burden families. In contrast, asexual reproduction tests your desire to have children. Cloning requires in vitro fertilization, which is successful only 30 percent of the time, so many would-be parents fall by the wayside. Only the luckiest and most perseverant get children. And that's as it should be.

Of course, lucky parents love their children. They neither take for granted their children's existence nor regard them as commodities. Today's cloned children know they were enthusiastically desired, whereas children created sexually always lack proof of being wanted.

2. HSR harms babies. In the old days, almost any young woman could have children. Many pregnant women drank alcohol and smoked, causing cleft palates, fetal-maternal alcohol syndrome, and low birth weight, I.Q. and Apgar scores, thereby harming thousands of babies.

Besides, HSR children may have deleterious genes. If HSR is allowed again, what's to prevent adults with Huntington's, cancer, and hemophilia from creating children? As we know, asexual reproduction through cloning eliminates random mixing of genes. In the 20th century, 2 percent of children - fully 120 million people - suffered from conditions linked to bad genes. Do we want to return to the old days, when the health of a child depended on the spin of the genetic roulette wheel?

3. HSR children will not be fully persons or fully ensouled. The highest levels of human functioning and ensoulment come from expression of the best genotypes. Anything less is subhuman, inferior and primitive. We shouldn't descend again to the animal level of sexual creation: That is unimaginable.

4. Society therefore will be prejudiced against HSR children. By now, cloning is so accepted that any child created in a different way will suffer discrimination at school and work. He will be marked as unwanted, composed of random genes, inferior. HSR children will be lobotomized for organ harvesting. They will also be slaves in off-world mines.

5. HSR is against God's will. Why did God allow cloning if it wasn't part of his plan? To revert to HSR is to throw a gift back in the face of the Giver.

6. HSR oppresses women. In the past, millions of women became involuntarily pregnant through rape, contraceptive failure, or bad timing. If we allow HSR again, men may abandon their female partners because of the attendant responsibilities. Sex might even stop being fun and start being reproductive work, as in the past. 

7. HSR allows narcissists to have children. Back in the old days, when asked why they wanted children, HSR parents replied: "To have something of myself continue after death. To have someone inherit my name. To have someone to take care of me in my old age." Procreation from such self-centered motives should obviously be a federal crime.

8. Sexual reproduction hurls us down the slippery slope. If we allow people to have children sexually again, it will be very difficult to prevent the next step: allowing people to choose how to originate children and when. Next, people will want to choose how many to have. After that, they'll demand the right to decide whether to have any children at all.

Unsavory scientists and physicians right now are waiting to help parents down this treacherous path. We must resist going one step further, lest we soon find ourselves in the pit below.

Copyrighted Gregory E. Pence, 2001. 

Greg Pence 
Professor, Philosophy & School of Medicine 
University of Alabama (UAB)