There is an urgent need for regulation of the new "market" which these new technologies promote. In this age of scientism and dualism, the human body has become a thing, one more field for experimentation. As a culture, we have succumbed to an approach to technological experimentation that has embraced the notion that whatever can be done should be done.
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LOS ANGELES (Catholic Online) - There is news out of California, which, if proven to be true, shows that one more moral line in the sand has been crossed. Dr. Samuel Wood of Stemagen Corp. in La Jolla, California claims to have cloned himself.
MSNBC reported that if the lab’s claims are true, “it is the first instance of cloning humans – only as embryos in a Petri dish, but still cloned human beings.” Wood told the network “it was an amazing experience to look at that blastocyst and realize that it came from one of my cells. It’s a bit like looking at yourself from a long time ago.”
Bioethics Defense Fund President and constitutional lawyer Nikolas T. Nikas notes that this news highlights the necessity of state and federal legislation banning the creation of cloned human embryos for any purpose:
“If true, the creation of human beings, at the embryonic stage of life by cloning, marks a new and decisive step toward turning human reproduction into a manufacturing process. The creation of human embryos for the purpose of exploitation as raw material for lab experiments is grossly immoral and a blatant violation of human dignity,” said Nikas.
He is absolutely correct.
Dorinda C. Bordlee, BDF senior counsel, added that this announcement, “puts young women’s reproductive health at risk because it will increase the demand for labs to treat women as egg farms by paying them to undergo dangerous hormone treatments so that the lab can harvest 10-20 human eggs per cycle for their cloning experiments.”
The Bioethics Defense Fund offers model legislation to ban human cloning and human egg harvesting at its web site, www.BDFund.org. I recommend the legislation and the Fund’s important work to all of my readers. Bioethics Defense Fund is a public-interest legal organization whose mission includes advocating for human rights in science through litigation, legislation and public education.
I remember when I was a much younger man. There was a silly country western tune, the refrain of which use to always make me smile. It was unique amidst the typical country lyrics concerning love affairs gone awry and hopes dashed against a sea of almost constant infidelity. It had a comical refrain: "I'm my own grandpa!"
I would laugh aloud to myself each time I heard it play on the local country music station.
The basic story line of the song concerned a series of illicit relationships, which, through the most improbable turns of sexual promiscuity and infidelity, resulted in the claim of this country crooner being true—he had become his own grandpa!
Little did I imagine then that the worldview unleashed and “legitimized” by the US Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, a decision which relegated an entire class of persons, children in the womb, to the status of property to be discarded when inconvenient, would lay the cultural framework for such possibilities to actually occur.
Sadly, that is now the case. In the last year of the twentieth century when Pandora’s box opened on this new science, one commentator coined our age as "the New Clone Age."
Out of this box legal, moral, sociological, and cultural challenges now multiply almost daily. The natural categories, of mother, father, grandfather and grandmother are being challenged in Courts and legislatures throughout the Nation. Those pushing the outer edge of science now present the possibility of six "parents" for a genetically engineered child produced, like a product, out of the petri dish.
There is the sperm vendor, the egg vendor, the surrogate "owner" of the fetal hotel once called a womb and the various possible commissioning "couples" all vying for legal recognition in a complex web of court decisions. Moreover, many of these new "couples" come from among all the various new configurations that our "enlightened" sexual libertinism has rendered not only acceptable, but also protected, by civil rights legislation.
A legal climate has resulted from the application of laws, originally and rightly enacted to protect against invidious discrimination. These once helpful laws are now being used by legal and social engineers to protect (read "promote") promiscuous sexual behavior, heterosexual or homosexual, outside of the marriage bond.
This is problematic enough in an age that has separated procreation from marital love and the marital embrace. But with the new social and cultural revolutionaries having the ability through legal precedents to wield the police power (because everything is protected by the State through the misapplication of civil rights laws) this new "morality" threatens the two-parent marriage bound family and the very foundations of Western civilization and law.
What’s more, to hold the view that sexual relations belong within monogamous, lifelong heterosexual marriage is considered ...
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