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Ethical Objections to Cloning Children |
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Daily Telegraph Tuesday 6 June 2006
Sir - I am perplexed by your leader (June 5) claiming that those who object to cloning "on grounds of religion or taste" have no business impeding those enlightened souls who do not. Why should respect for human life and for parenthood not constitute adequate grounds for society to prohibit a practice that violates both at a stroke?
It is not necessary to be a Cartesian dualist to object to creating clone siblings from the remains of an IVF embryo created and killed for the purpose. On the contrary, it is precisely the interests of the bodily individual in his or her own future that are being wrongly thwarted.
Anyone who recognises both that we are bodily beings, and that we have objective interests in our future, can recognise the injustice of creating an embryo simply as raw material for the creation of new embryos. It is difficult to imagine an origin less likely to give a child a sense of unconditional acceptance than a deliberately destroyed "clone original": the child's very body is composed from the body of a sibling rejected as substandard.
Dr Helen Watt, Director, Linacre Centre for Healthcare Ethics, London NW8
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