Human cloning and child welfare

The global governance of human cloning: the case of UNESCO

Since Dolly the Sheep was cloned in 1996, the question of whether human reproductive cloning should be banned or pursued has been the subject of international debate. Feelings run strong on both sides. In 2005, the United Nations adopted its Declaration on Human Cloning to try to deal with the issue. The declaration is ambiguously worded, prohibiting "all forms of human cloning inasmuch as they are incompatible with human dignity and the protection of human life". It received only ambivalent support from UN member states. Given this unsatisfactory outcome, in 2008 UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) set up a Working Group to investigate the possibility of a legally binding convention to ban human reproductive cloning. The Working Group was made up of members of the International Bioethics Committee, established in 1993 as part of UNESCO's Bioethics Programme. It found that the lack of clarity in international law is unhelpful for those states yet to formulate national regulations or policies on human cloning. Despite this, member states of UNESCO resisted the idea of a convention for several years. This changed in 2015, but there has been no practical progress on the issue. Drawing on official records and first-hand observations at bioethics meetings, this article examines the human cloning debate at UNESCO from 2008 onwards, thus building on and advancing current scholarship by applying recent ideas on global governance to an empirical case. It concludes that, although human reproductive cloning is a challenging subject, establishing a robust global governance framework in this area may be possible via an alternative deliberative format, based on knowledge sharing and feasibility testing rather than the interest-based bargaining that is common to intergovernmental organizations and involving a wide range of stakeholders. This article is published as part of a collection on global governance.

Procreative liberty, enhancement and commodification in the human cloning debate

The aim of this paper is to scrutinize a contemporary standoff in the American debate over the moral permissibility of human reproductive cloning in its prospective use as a eugenic enhancement technology. I shall argue that there is some significant and under-appreciated common ground between the defenders and opponents of human cloning. Champions of the moral and legal permissibility of cloning support the technology based on the right to procreative liberty provided it were to become as safe as in vitro fertilization and that it be used only by adults who seek to rear their clone children. However, even champions of procreative liberty oppose the commodification of cloned embryos, and, by extension, the resulting commodification of the cloned children who would be produced via such embryos. I suggest that a Kantian moral argument against the use of cloning as an enhancement technology can be shown to be already implicitly accepted to some extent by champions of procreative liberty on the matter of commodification of cloned embryos. It is in this argument against commodification that the most vocal critics of cloning such as Leon Kass and defenders of cloning such as John Robertson can find greater common ground. Thus, I endeavor to advance the debate by revealing a greater degree of moral agreement on some fundamental premises than hitherto recognized.

Psychological aspects of human cloning and genetic manipulation: the identity and uniqueness of human beings

Human cloning has become one of the most controversial debates about reproduction in Western civilization. Human cloning represents asexual reproduction, but the critics of human cloning argue that the result of cloning is not a new individual who is genetically unique. There is also awareness in the scientific community, including the medical community, that human cloning and the creation of clones are inevitable. Psychology and other social sciences, together with the natural sciences, will need to find ways to help the healthcare system, to be prepared to face the new challenges introduced by the techniques of human cloning. One of those challenges is to help the healthcare system to find specific standards of behaviour that could be used to help potential parents to interact properly with cloned babies or children created through genetic manipulation. In this paper, the concepts of personality, identity and uniqueness are discussed in relationship to the contribution of twin studies in these areas. The author argues that an individual created by human cloning techniques or any other type of genetic manipulation will not show the donor's characteristics to the extent of compromising uniqueness. Therefore, claims to such an effect are needlessly alarmist.

Twins: A cloning experience

Drawing upon qualitative interviews with monozygotic (identical) twins sharing 100% of their genes, and with dizygotic (fraternal) twins and singletons as control groups, this paper explores what it means to be genetically identical. (The twins interviewed were from the TwinsUK register in London.) In the context of the ongoing debate on human reproductive cloning, it examines questions such as: To what extent do identical twins perceive their emotional and physical bond to be a result of their genetic makeup? What would they think if they had been deliberately created genetically identical? How would they feel about being genetically identical to a person who was born a few years earlier or later? First, our respondents ascribed no great significance to the role of genes in their understanding of what it means to be identical twins. Second, the opinion that human reproductive cloning would "interfere with nature", or "contradict God's will", was expressed by our respondents exclusively on the abstract level. The more our respondents were able to relate a particular invented cloning scenario to their own life-worlds, the lower the prevalence of the argument. Third, for all three groups of respondents, the scenario of having been born in one of the other groups was perceived as strange. Fourth, the aspect that our respondents disliked about cloning scenarios was the potential motives of the cloners. Without equating monozygotic twins directly with "clones", these results from "naturally" genetically identical individuals add a new dimension to what a future cloning situation could entail: The cloned person might possibly (a) perceive a close physical and emotional connection to the progenitor as a blessing; (b) suffer from preconceptions of people who regard physical likeness as a sign of incomplete individuality; and (c) perceive the idea of not having been born a clone of a particular person as unpleasant.

Sex selection and regulated hatred

This paper argues that the HFEA's recent report on sex selection abdicates its responsibility to give its own authentic advice on the matters within its remit, that it accepts arguments and conclusions that are implausible on the face of it and where they depend on empirical claims, produces no empirical evidence whatsoever, but relies on reckless speculation as to what the "facts" are likely to be. Finally, having committed itself to what I call the "democratic presumption", that human freedom will not be constrained unless very good and powerful reasons can be produced to justify such infringement of liberty, the HFEA simply reformulates the democratic presumption as saying the opposite--namely that freedom may only be exercised if powerful justifications are produced for any exercise of liberty.

Ethics and synthetic gametes

The recent in vitro derivation of gamete-like cells from mouse embryonic stem (mES) cells is a major breakthrough and lays down several challenges, both for the further scientific investigation and for the bioethical and biolegal discourse. We refer here to these cells as gamete-like (sperm-like or oocyte-like, respectively), because at present there is still no evidence that these cells behave fully like bona fide sperm or oocytes, lacking the fundamental proof, i.e. combination with a normally derived gamete of the opposite sex to yield a normal individual. However, the results published so far do show that these cells share some defining features of gametes. We discuss these results in the light of the bioethical and legal questions that are likely to arise would the same process become possible with human embryonic stem (hES) cells.

Restoring natural function: access to infertility treatment using donated gametes

Fertility services are the only area of medicine in which health professionals are required by law to make social judgements about a person's suitability for treatment. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act of 1990 imposes restrictions on access to licensed fertility treatment based on social judgements about the probable welfare of any resulting child. In this paper, it is argued that just as social judgements are inappropriate in other contexts, so they are in the context of fertility treatment. Furthermore, the ambiguous requirement for concern for the welfare of the resulting child simply does not provide a just and ethically defensible solution to the problem of access to licensed fertility treatment. born as a result of the treatment (including the need of that child for a father) and of any other child who may be affected by the birth treatment.

Should doctors intentionally do less than the best?

The papers of Burley and Harris, and Draper and Chadwick, in this issue, raise a problem: what should doctors do when patients request an option which is not the best available? This commentary argues that doctors have a duty to offer that option which will result in the individual affected by that choice enjoying the highest level of wellbeing. Doctors can deviate from this duty and submaximise--bring about an outcome that is less than the best--only if there are good reasons to do so. The desire to have a child which is genetically related provides little, if any, reason to submaximise. The implication for cloning, preimplantation diagnosis and embryo transfer is that doctors should only produce a clone or transfer embryos expected to enjoy a level of wellbeing which is less than that enjoyed by other children the couple could have, if there is a good reason to employ that technology. This paper sketches what might constitute a good reason to submaximise.