What are the two types of cloning?

The first and most well know type of cloning is cloning to produce children, or “reproductive cloning.” The second type of cloning is cloning for biomedical research, or “therapeutic cloning.”

What is reproductive cloning (cloning to produce children)?

Humans may one day be able to be cloned using a procedure similar to the one used to generate Dolly the sheep. This kind of cloning involves taking the nucleus of a body (somatic) cell and introducing it into an egg cell (ovum) which has had its nucleus removed. The resultant cloned embryo is then implanted into a uterus to bring it to birth. The cloned embryo is an identical twin of the person who donated the starting somatic cell. Cloning is simply another approach to mimicking the biology that generates identical twins.

What is therapeutic cloning (cloning for research)?

Therapeutic cloning involves making a cloned embryo by the same series of steps as reproductive cloning, but instead of implanting it into a uterus to be born the embryo is destroyed to harvest its stem cells. Hence, therapeutic cloning is identical to reproductive cloning except for the final step. Therapeutic cloning is sometimes referred to as the “clone and kill” technique. The aim is to obtain rejection-proof stem cells for transplantation into the person from whom the clone was made. Because stem cells from the clone are actually from the identical twin of the person cloned, they should theoretically be a good match and not be rejected.

Why is human reproductive cloning wrong?

Cloning participates in the basic evil of moving human procreation out of the setting of committed marital intimacy and into the laboratory. Human procreation should not take place in the laboratory because it is inherently dehumanizing to bring a new human being into the world through means which replace the marital act. Each of us has a right to be brought into the world as the fruit and expression of marital love, rather than as the product of technical domination and manufacturing protocols. Procreation is not meant to be replaced by production. There is a dignity both to the process of procreation as established by God through sexual self giving and the dignity of the life itself which is engendered by the process. Cloning threatens human dignity on both of those levels.

Cloning also represents a sort of genetic engineering. Instead of choosing just a few of the features you’d like your offspring to have – like greater height or greater intelligence – cloning could allow you to choose all of the features, so it represents an extremely serious form of domination and manipulation by parents over their own children. It represents a type of parental power that parents are not intended to have. Ultimately, cloning is a type of human breeding, a despotic attempt by some individuals to dominate and pre-determine the make-up of others. With cloning you also distort the relationships between individuals and generations. If a woman were to clone herself, using her own egg, her own somatic cell, and her own womb, she wouldn’t need to have a man involved at all.

Oddly, she would end up giving birth to her own identical twin – a twin sister who would also be her daughter.

Why is human therapeutic cloning wrong?

If human reproductive cloning – the bringing to birth of a new child who is an identical twin to somebody else – is wrong, then therapeutic cloning is worse. Therapeutic cloning is the creation of the same identical twin for the premeditated purpose of ending her life in order to harvest her tissues. In sum, there is a grave evil involved in therapeutic cloning because life is created for the explicit purpose of destroying it. With a cloned birth, at least we would end up with a baby that is alive. Human therapeutic cloning, the artificial creation of a human life for the sole purpose of her exploitation and destruction, will always be gravely unethical even if the desired end is a very good one, namely the curing of diseases. Therapeutic cloning sanctions the direct and explicit exploitation of one human being by another, in this case, the exploitation of the weak by the powerful.

The danger of therapeutic cloning lies in the intentional creation of a subclass of human beings, made up of those still in their embryonic or fetal stages, who can be freely exploited and discriminated against by those fortunate enough to have already passed beyond those early embryonic stages.

Therapeutic cloning raises further serious slippery-slope concerns. The temptation to make embryos that can be exploited for their stem cells offers the further temptation to grow those cloned embryos within a uterus to the point of a fetus. Such a fetus can then be aborted and conveniently harvested for needed organs, avoiding the trouble of having to start from scratch with undifferentiated stem cells.

Information taken from Stem Cell Research, Cloning & Human Embryos brochure written by Rev. Dr. Tadeusx Pacholczyk
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