Moral Cloning

Gerald L. Zelizer

The dispute over human cloning has been revved up another notch with the successful cloning last week of mice in by Japanese scientists in a Hawaiian laboratory. Dr. Lee Silver, a mouse geneticist and reproductive biologist Princeton University, predicts that this giant step will lead to "in vitrio fertilization clinics adding human cloning to their repertoires within 5 to 10 years."

This will be but another chapter in the seesaw battle between science and religion. Earlier attempts to defeat bills in the Congress which would ban cloning were encouraged by the letter of 27 Nobel Prize winners who objected that the proposed legislation would impede scientific research. A previous victory belonged to the religious side who succeeded in persuading the president to prohibit the use of federal funding for human cloning investigation.

Many religious voices are sure to echo the earlier concern of Southern Seminary President Albert Mohler that "cloning represents the attempt of the creature to be the creator.." A member of the Presidents Bioethics Advisory Committee, Thomas Murray, explained on the Jim Lehrer show "I'm uneasy about interfering with advances of science and the freedom of scientists. But I'm even more uneasy about tampering with a 'moral and social sense' of what it means to be a human being."

I fear that religious leaders have rushed too quickly to fence off this next technological frontier.

At an earlier frontier, that of birth surrogacy, a physician and his wife in my community was wife one of the first couples in the U.S. to venture forth. He and his wife planned to fertilize their sperm and egg in a test-tube and then implant the embryo in a surrogate in Detroit. As a religious Jew, he would not proceed without approval from his rabbi, who immediately said that Jewish religious ethics allowed and even encouraged birth surrogacy. I can envision similar questions in the near future from clergymen on the matter of cloning humans as a strategy to overcome infertility. Unhesitantly, I would approve.

Cloning does present moral questions. Jewish ethicist Rabbi Elliot Dorff has pinpointed them. Who would be cloned? "If cloning is left to the economic forces of the marketplace, presumably the rich and famous, but not necessarily the good would be cloned." Secondly, "how would the results of cloning be evaluated and by whom? How would bad results be disposed of? And, lastly, "to what uses would cloning be put?"

These moral considerations argue for the regulation of cloning, not its banning.

From a religious perspective, cloning, like other technologies is morally neutral, depending on how it is used. Adam and Eve were put into the Garden of eden "to work and preserve it.." As long as an scientific technique is used to work and preserve the world it is morally acceptable. At the same time, the Tower of Babel story warns us that we are not God. and that technology must be used with care, caution and humility.

A potential benefit of cloning is to alleviate infertility, recently stirred up by physicist Richard Seed with his threat to open cloning clinics. Even though Seed has been portrayed as odd, his proposal is not immoral.

Pastoral counseling is a big part of a clergyperson's day. Bereavement is the most common and complex human situation that I counsel as a rabbi. The emotional despondency of infertility is a close second, and its sadness emulates bereavement. A couple who has attempted unsuccessfully for years to conceive frequently suffers, as the mourner, feelings of frustration, blame, anger, and guilt. Both bereavement and infertility are about immortality.

In bereavement after death one mourns what has been lost. Infertile parents mourn what never been gained. The inability to conceive offspring is to many like death without a body.

The Bible itself contains one episode after another of infertile couples. Abraham and Sarah cannot conceive until God "provides" a concubine with who Abraham conceives Ishmael. Sarah remains barren through old age when through miraculous intervention she bears Isaac. Jacob bears a son with Leah, eliciting the envy of his preferred wife, Rachel, who is barren. Hannah prays and weeps because of her childlessness so that her husband Elhanah has to assure her:" Are you not better to me than ten children?" The Bible's solutions for infertility may not be our twentieth century solutions. But that the Almighty is grieved over childlessness and seeks solutions within nature and beyond it is the clear message. Cloning is one such natural solution which responds to the grief of God Himself.

Underlying the resistance of religious spokespeople to cloning is an assumed resistance of religion to human technology, when the opposite is the case. In a recent book "The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention" David Noble argues that the technological enterprise has always been "an essentially religious endeavor," In the Middle Ages monasteries served as the matrix of inventions. In this century Sam B. Morse, whose father was an evangelical sent as his first message "What hath God wrought." The father of Orville and Wilbur Wright was a bishop of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ. Freemasons spawned pioneers of every American field including steamboats (Robert Fulton), the automobile (Henry Ford), and the airplane( Charles Lindbergh) and space flight (one half dozen astronauts).

This dawning technology of cloning to alleviate human suffering should also be embraced by formal religion. It enables couples who previously turned to anonymous strangers for egg, sperm, or embryo donations to have a genetic tie to their children and fulfill more directly the Biblical mandate at Eden "Be fruitful and multiply."

A scientist who is also a Jesuit priest, Kevin Fitzgerald, of Loyola Medical School, was the advisor to congressional bills to ban cloning. I disagree with my colleague. Carefully controlled cloning assists, rather than undermines, the Almighty.