Madam Chairwoman and distinguished members of the committee, thank you for allowing me to give testimony on this extremely important issue today. I am C. Ben Mitchell, assistant professor of bioethics and contemporary culture at Trinity International University in Deerfield, Illinois. I am also senior fellow of The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity in Bannockburn. My academic training is in theoretical and applied ethics, with a concentration in medical ethics. I have published widely on issues at the intersection of ethics and medicine and am presently editing a volume on human cloning.
Because of the limitations of time, I will get right to the point. The debate about human cloning is not merely a debate about a breathtaking discovery or a novel experimental research protocol. The debate about human cloning is more fundamentally a debate about the kind of society we will become. Will we become a society which permits the use (or, I would argue, abuse) of one person for the benefits or desires of others, or will we continue to be a society which protects individuals against the threat of being subjects of research without their consent?
I agree with Leon Kass, the distinguished Addie Clark Harding Professor in the College and of The Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, that cloning is not something "to be fretted about for a while, but finally to be given our seal of approval . . . the future of our humanity hangs in the balance" (Kass, "The Wisdom of Repugnance: Why We Should Ban the Cloning of Humans," The New Republic, 2 June 1991, p. 18). How is this so? In what way does our future hang in the balance?
Most of the rationales which have been offered to support human cloning can be dismissed out of hand as unethical. The idea that someone should be allowed to clone another person because they thought they were somehow stellar figures of whom the world could not do without reflects a very ugly narcissism I think we can reject outright. The notion of creating an entire basketball team of Michael Jordans is to be repudiated for at least two reasons. First, if one could clone a "gaggle" of Jordans, one could likewise clone a "pride" of Hitlers. I should think that in an effort to avoid the latter, we would be sure to prohibit the former. Second, an entire basketball team of Michael Jordans would immediately remove that which is unique and special about the one, and the only, Michael Jordan. In fact, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago, worries about just this problem. (Elshtain, "To Clone or Not to Clone," Martha C. Nussbaum and Cass R. Sunstein (eds.), Clones and Clones: Facts and Fantasies About Human Cloning, New York: W. W. Norton, 1998, pp. 181-189). It is his singularity that renders Mr. Jordan so "extra"-ordinary. Moreover, the suggestion that one may grow a clone and hide it in a closet somewhere to be used for spare body parts is probably not going to happen. Such a thought is too fantastic to imagine. Finally, using a clone as a "replacement" child for an offspring who dies in childhood is as grotesque as it is impossible. While these are certainly possibilities, I doubt they will happen in the forseeable future.
But what could happen (and, in fact, what is happening) is that human beings could be used as subjects of research without their will or consent. That is to say, to clone a human being through a technique like somatic cell nuclear transfer would be to violate that person's right not to be subjected to potential harm without his or her permission. Imagine for a moment what allowing human cloning might mean for the erosion of this crucial right.
It took Ian Wilmut, the scientist at the Roslin Institute who cloned Dolly, two hundred seventy attempts to get one sheep! That means that 276 sheep were killed in the attempt to clone one. How many human lives would be maimed or destroyed in order to clone one person successfully? To sacrifice the life of even one human being in an effort to create a clone is a price far too high to pay. Even if the goal of cloning a human being were morally acceptable, the means to get there is not. We must reject the utilitarian ethos which so often informs our contemporary culture.
Furthermore, we now have a lengthy and hard-won tradition in our society of not using human beings as research subjects without their consent. We now presume that doctors will reveal to potential subjects the nature of experiments they might want them to serve in, and that those doctors will obtain permission to study them. This tradition developed through some very painful experience historically. In the 1930s and 1940s human subjects were routinely lied to about research being performed on them. Experimentation on the effects of radiation on human beings and the now infamous Tuskeegee syphilis experiments are examples of the tragedies which taught us not to use human beings in this way. And we believe so strongly in a person's right not to be treated or to be the subject of research without consent that to do so is regarded in the law as a form of battery.
Someone might object and say that we are not talking about experimenting on human beings, but about using human cells for the purpose of somatic cell nuclear transfer. This is a deceptive strategy. First, while we might disagree about the exact stage of development at which this might occur, everyone agrees that at some point in the process, a human being will have been cloned. The reproductive cell used in nuclear transfer is a living cell. At the moment the nucleus is inserted into the cell, it begins to multiply. At whatever that point in development one holds that those cells constitute a human being, we will have violated that person's inviolable right not to be a subject of research without his or her consent.
Second, most people are troubled by the idea of using human embryos solely for research, and a cloned human egg cell which has begun to replicate is an embryo. Writing in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, George Annas, Art Caplan, and Sherman Elias have opined:
"To create human embryos solely for research--or to sell them, or to use them in toxicity testing--seems morally wrong because it seems to cheapen the act of procreation and turn embryos into commodities. Creating embryos specifically for research also puts women at risk as sources of ova for projects that provide them no benefit. The moral problem with making embryos for research is that as a society we do not want to see embryos treated as products or mere objects, for fear that we will cheapen the value of parenting, risk commercializing procreation, and trivialize the act of procreation" (Annas, Caplan, and Elias, "Sounding Board," New England Journal of Medicine, 16 May 1996).
Again, this is just the problem with cloning a human being, viz., that it cannot be done without violating that human being. Moreover, to clone a human being is to treat that person as a means to someone else's ends rather than as an end in himself or herself.
Distinguished members of this committee, an amazingly strong public consensus has developed over past nearly three years since Dolly was cloned. A poll released by ABC's "Nightline" television program the day after Dolly was announced revealed that 87 percent of those polled thought cloning should be banned. Eighty-two percent said cloning human beings would be morally wrong and 93 percent said they would not choose to be cloned. The public's initial reaction of horror about the prospect of human cloning has been confirmed over and again. There are simply no good reasons to do it and there are plenty of good reasons not to do it. To experiment on a human being without his or her consent is simply unconscionable. If we permit such a practice, we will have become a society which technologically preys on one group of its citizens for the good of another group of its citizens.
Leon Kass is right when he says, "We must rise to the occasion and make our judgments as if the future of humanity hangs in the balance. For so it does" (Kass, "The Wisdom of Repugnance"). I humbly urge you to recommend and, at the appropriate time, to vote for the passage of SB 649 and pass the moratorium on human cloning. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman and members of the committee.