Human Cloning

Human Cloning

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What exactly is the moral problem with human cloning? Well, we should first get straight why human beings may want to clone themselves. The worst reason would be to harvest organs from the cloned person or conduct harmful scientific experiments with no regard to the clone’s welfare. Other reasons could include an infertile couple’s desire to have children where natural procreation, artificial insemination and even invetro fertilization are impossible. This is not even to mention the possibilities of cloning children who are not even your own. Imagine the market for purchasing embryonic clones of LeBron James and having them inserted into your uterus!

But let’s assume the best – an infertile heterosexual couple who wants a child but (adoption aside) cannot do so except without recourse to cloning one of the two parents. Just think. If they go ahead with it, their child will, genetically speaking, be either its mother’s or father’s twin brother or sister. The clone’s mother would also be her sister, and in fact, her real mother would be the women she knew as her grandmother. This is getting confusing, but you can see how bizarre it becomes!

But this isn’t even the real reason the Catholic Church opposes human cloning even for strictly reproductive reasons. Cloning is wrong for the same reason invetro fertilization is wrong. Namely, because it is contrary to human dignity for a person to be manufactured, which is exactly what cloning is. Humans ought to be procreated out of the same act of conjugal love that binds their parents together in the state of matrimony. Everything else falls short of God’s plan.