Cloning

This is the text of a sermon preached at the High Mass on 25^th January 2004

Last week, into the purposeful calm that pervades the Vicarage in the last two hours before the Sunday morning round begins, broke the voice of a scientist, wishing to advance the cause of cloning.  Brushing aside all the objections, he proclaimed that the Church should keep its nose out of science and leave it to the professionals.

In this assertion, he laid bare an arrogance about the omni-sufficiency of the scientists’ mind that cannot be humoured.  Humanity is not the playground of medical research and it is manifest nonsense that Christians, or anyone else for that matter, should not bring whatever pressure they can to scrutinise what is going on in the laboratories of our world.

All technological advances have collateral impact and it is a responsibility of society to try and weigh up the potential advantages and demerits of one project or another.  It is said that a number of those involved in the development of nuclear physics surveyed with dismay the monster of mutually assured destruction, which they had facilitated.  However, invent in haste, repent at leisure is hardly a responsible approach to the stewardship of the world’s resources.

When this touches on the very being of human character, we need to be particularly careful and we might start by focusing our consideration of the issue around two questions.

The first is why we need to develop the capacity to clone human beings.

The proposition that any expansion of scientific knowledge is self-justifying cannot be sustained.  The work of Josef Mengele in the death camps of Nazism, for example, did provide some insights; none-the-less, he was branded a monster and a war criminal for his efforts – a judgement from which few would demur today. 

The connected opinion that the tide of research is inexorable, and that realists will bow to the inevitable is equally spurious.  If we do not have the mind or the will to resist what we consider evil, fundamental questions are raised about our society.  Furthermore, to justify the advance of a piece of research on the grounds it being inevitable is merely an attempt to leap over the arguments that might stand in its way.  Only in hindsight can we know for certain whether a particular course was bound to happen.

Those trying to justify their work on cloning cite the various enhancements of human life that it will bring.  Everyone of them has an attraction for the constituency of people, whose distress it proposes to mitigate; but we all know the maxim that hard cases make bad law and we need to wonder whether cloning will open a Pandora’s Box of consequences, which we would not wish released on our society.

If you are childless and have a yearning for parenthood, then cloning may apparently be the answer to your prayers.  Over the past couple of decades there has been a considerable shift towards the notion that anyone who desires to have a child should be assisted in anyway possible to achieve their ambition.  There has been no formal proposition that it is de jure a fundamental human right and it is unlikely that any authoritative body would ever so pronounce, but de facto the momentum towards such a position is growing.

There is an argument that those who are sufficiently fertile can have children no matter how inadequate their parenting capacity will be.  This is not quite true, since we do remove children from their natural parents in extreme circumstances; but it certainly seems that there are many homes and contexts to which nature denies offspring, which would provide a very supportive environment for the raising of children.  Is this enough to justify cloning? – maybe.

Then we are told that cloning would be a means of providing spare parts for siblings.  Produce a couple of children from the same mould, so the theory goes, and if medical crises arise in one, the other could step in and supply a kidney, perhaps, that would be a perfect match.  For parents of a child desperately struggling to overcome some terrible disease, this is a very attractive proposition; but for others, there are prima facie qualms about subordinating one human being’s status to the role of support resource for another.  However, the practice of an heir and spare has long been common in some circles and many of us will know of families with a string of boys, bearing witness to their parents’ desire for a daughter.  Is there a qualitative difference?

Most problematic of all for some, maybe is the suggestion that cloning will permit the selection of the sorts of human beings that are born.  When couched in terms of excluding some terrible genetic illness, many would be supportive, though even in these cases there are counter arguments; but more broadly, the question arises as to who would choose what constituted the sorts of human characteristics that would make a desirable clone – those sufficiently rich to pay for it? – democratic governments, subject to the pressures of ephemeral popular whim? - or tyrannies accountable to no one?

Which brings us to the second question – is cloning really an appropriate development at all?

The ecclesiastical hierarchies are seen as the Monsieur Nyet of human biological research; often accusing scientists of seeking to play God.  However, surely caution is right and proper in such questions as long as our hesitation is carefully and rigorously presented.

In addressing the issue of cloning within the context of the divine prerogative of creation, we need to be quite clear as to what we understand God’s role in the process.  Few of us would picture Him, as it were, with a hands-on part in every individual human emergence into the world.  Rather, we see Him underpinning and sustaining the unfolding generations of life; a process in which we consider ourselves pro-creators.

So we must judge how far our delegated role can go and where we must defer to the divine.  It is not enough just to state that we cannot interfere in the natural process: few of us would refuse a blood transfusion or an organ transplant, which equally interrupt the natural flow of things – is cloning qualitatively different from these?

The answer to this seems to be that it is.  Medical interventions do not presently interrupt the flow of human evolution.  This does not mean that they cannot alter the course of history by prolonging a life, but they do not fundamentally interfere with the momentum of adaptation.

As generation succeeds generation either randomly or through the influences of divine providence, depending on your point of view, humanity responds little by little to its changing environment.  Cloning threatens to create the opportunity, as it were, to stop the clock and for us to preserve artificially a particular generation and narrow the diversity, which enables the human race to respond so flexibly to events beyond our control.

There is also a huge raft of questions as to what impact it will have on a human being to have developed in so different a way from that, with which we have thus far been familiar.  Increasingly, we are aware that pre-natal experiences are hugely influential in psychological development and we need to reflect on what will be the effects of a conception so other from what God, or nature, has provided.

The Church, and society as a whole, needs to be pressing these questions in the face of scientific advance.  We cannot leave this to scientists keen to win the race of research and make their name.  They are not minor considerations, but questions that are of fundamental importance to us all and we owe it to those who will come after us to resolve them as well as we can.

Home page: http://stmatthewsnewcastle.org.uk/