Strange Clonefellows

A GREAT DEFICIENCY in the media’s reporting of debates about public policy is their tendency to reduce messy democratic discourse to a sterile, never-ending face-off between “The Left” and “The Right.” One year, The Right launches an offensive and advances a half-mile. The next year, The Left counterattacks and regains the lost ground.

This caricature has certainly dominated the reporting of the debate over human cloning, which is usually portrayed as a contest between religious opponents of abortion and medical researchers striving to benefit humankind. The stereotype was epitomized in a January 17, 2002, Washington Post story by science reporter Rick Weiss. Implying that opponents of human cloning are the moral equivalent of the Taliban, Weiss wrote:

“In November, researchers announced that they had made the first human embryo clones, giving immediacy to warnings by religious conservatives and others that science is no longer serving the nation’s moral will. At the same time, the United States was fighting a war to free a faraway nation from the grip of religious conservatives who were denounced for imposing their moral code on others.”

The Post ombudsman gently rebuked Weiss for his “real or perceived bias,” but the fact that he made the comparison, and that no editor removed it, is revealing.

In reality, the opponents of human cloning are not so easily categorized. For one thing, they include many secular activists associated with the pro-choice left. Last year, in a lopsided bipartisan vote, the House of Representatives passed the Weldon bill (H.2505), which would outlaw both research and reproductive human cloning. Among those supporting the ban were 21 House members whose voting records on abortion were at least 75 percent pro-choice as scored by the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL).

Now, 68 leftist activists have signed a “Statement in Support of Legislation to Prohibit Cloning.” Among them are such notables as activist Jeremy Rifkin, New York University professor Todd Gitlin, novelist Norman Mailer, Commonweal editor Margaret O’Brien, Abortion Access Project director Susan Yanow, New Age spiritual leader Matthew Fox, and Judy Norsigian, author of the feminist manifesto “Our Bodies, Ourselves.”

Among arguments against the cloning of human life, these leftists stress the “commercial eugenics” that the new technologies threaten to unleash. They write:

We are also concerned about the increasing bio-industrialization of life by the scientific community and life science companies and shocked and dismayed that clonal human embryos have been patented and declared to be human “inventions.” We oppose efforts to reduce human life and its various parts and processes to the status of mere research tools, manufactured products, commodities, and utilities.

These are points that conservative opponents of cloning have been making for a long time, with limited effect thanks to the media’s obsession with the politics of abortion. That may change, now that some leaders of the American left are becoming fully engaged in the drive to ban human cloning. If it does, the chances of outlawing human cloning will improve dramatically.

Still, the question lingers: Can these strange bedfellows of right and left work closely together for as long as it takes to prevail against a Brave New World? Or, to put it another way, can deep differences over fundamental issues such as abortion be set aside long enough to prevent the threatened flood of human cloning?

Jeremy Rifkin, who led what may have been the first anti-cloning demonstration more than twenty years ago at the First National Conference on Biotechnology, hopes so. While acknowledging that he is “very uncomfortable” working alongside people and groups with whose stances on other issues he profoundly disagrees, Rifkin believes that the struggle to defeat human cloning cuts a broad diagonal across the standard left/right divide. “Cloning pits believers in the ‘intrinsic’ value of human life against those who measure human life based on its ‘utility,'” with conservatives, moderates, and liberals found in both camps, Rifkin says. Moreover, he believes that the cloning debate “will be as pivotal to the morality of the next hundred years as the struggle over slavery was to the Nineteenth Century.”

Opponents of human cloning are not far from victory. With the House having passed a strong cloning ban, and President Bush endorsing efforts to outlaw human cloning, the advocates of cloning will make their last stand in the Senate. There, the Brownback bill (S. 1899) to outlaw human cloning, almost identical to the Weldon bill, is being countered by two pseudo-bans. Both the Harkin/ Specter bill (S. 1893) and the Feinstein bill (S. 1758) claim to outlaw human “reproductive cloning,” but both would explicitly permit cloning for research. In actuality, such proposals would open the floodgates to the cloning of human life, so long as the human embryos created thereby were never implanted in a uterus. Indeed, Feinstein’s bill, which senators Clinton, Kennedy, and Boxer are supporting, is radically pro-human cloning. Not only would it permit Big Biotech researchers to clone human life without restriction, it would also preempt states from outlawing human cloning in their jurisdictions.

Where is all of this leading? If Brownback is passed, the human cloning agenda will be stopped in its tracks in the United States. That would permit researchers here to focus on uncontroversial and promising research into the development of medical therapies using adult and alternative sources of stem cells. If Brownback fails, or if either Feinstein or Harkin passes, hundreds and even thousands of human clones will soon be manufactured — inevitably leading to reproductive cloning, since there would be no realistic way to prevent some scientist somewhere from implanting a cloned embryo into a woman desiring to give birth to the first human clone. A ban on “reproductive cloning” thus would actually open the door to the very act it purported to prohibit.

But that would not be the end of it. The human cloning agenda is not limited to medical research or the development of new reproductive technologies. The ultimate goal for many proponents of human cloning is to use clones to model and perfect genetic engineering techniques that would permit scientists to seize control of human evolution.

Clone embryos are deemed superior for this purpose to embryos created through fertilization because the former can be made in large supply, giving scientists many genetically identical embryos on which to experiment. This would make it easier for researchers to learn how to manipulate embryos so as to carry the genetic traits they want to foster. Once this was accomplished, many cell lines could easily be extracted for further research by repeatedly remaking the same clone embryo. Eventually, this technology would be applied to embryos — both natural and cloned — destined for implantation, gestation, and birth. In the end, such practices would permit the new eugenics celebrated by Princeton biologist Lee M. Silver in “Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World.” Embryos could be screened for genotype, leading to genetically modified human beings.

Nothing in the Feinstein or Harkin bill would prohibit such research. This is precisely why Rifkin and many others on the left fervently seek to outlaw all human cloning. “Cloning would permit us to apply engineering standards to procreation. Our children would be selected based on quality controls, production outcomes, efficiency, and utility” — in other words, the values of the assembly line. “Once we start engineering human life, we will lose our empathy,” Rifkin warns. “Should that happen, we will have lost the human equation.”

This is a compelling argument that people of all political stripes and religious sensibilities may be able to rally around regardless of their differences. If they do, the political struggle against human cloning and eugenics in coming years will be a battle not of left versus right but of right versus wrong, in which those who seem at first sight strange bedfellows strive together to thwart scientific hubris and foster a deeper respect for the intrinsic worth of human life.