The Ethics Of Human Cloning

Views on Human Cloning

A 1997 February CNN poll conducted among 1,005 American adults :
  • 93% felt that cloning humans is a bad idea
  • 66% felt that cloning animals, such as sheep, is a bad idea
  • 69% are scared of the possibility of cloning humans
  • 74% believe that human cloning is against God's will; 19% say that it is not.

A poll conducted in February 2001 :
  • 90% felt that cloning humans was a bad idea
  • 67% felt that cloning animals, such as sheep, was a bad idea
  • 45% believe that it will be possible to clone a human within the next ten years
  • 69% believe that human cloning is against God's will; 23% say that it is not

Views Against Human Cloning

"Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling,or patenting human embryos." 
~ George W. Bush

"One of the prospects should not be, perhaps should never be, the extension of this technique to human beings... Now that it may be possible we would say it should be prohibited if necessary by law." 
~ Carl Felbaum

"[Human Cloning should carry a penalty] on par with rape, child abuse, and murder." 
~ Jeremy Rifkin

"Cloning, like all science, must be used responsibly. Cloning humans is not desirable, but cloning sheep has its uses." 
~ Mary Seller

"[Human Cloning research may well be] sowing the seeds of our destruction."
~ Richard Nicholson

"...Methods that fail to respect the dignity and value of the person must always be avoided. I am thinking in particular of attempts at human cloning with a view to obtaining organs for transplants: these techniques, insofar as they involve the manipulation and destruction of human embryos, are not morally acceptable, even when their proposed goal is good in itself."
~ Pope John Paul II


"I think that the lowest penalty imposed on those who invented cloning should be amputation of their hands and feet. Otherwise, they should be executed. It amounts to manipulation of humankind. It's the worst kind of corruption on earth."
~ Sheikh Mohammad ibn Saleh al-Othimin 

Views For Human Cloning

"A society that bans acts of human creation that reflect unconventional sex roles or parenting models for no better reason than that such acts dare to defy 'nature' and tradition is a society that risks cutting itself off from vital experimentation and risks sterilizing a significant part of its capacity to grow" 
~ Laurence Tribe

"Politicians should not have to veto power over the creation of life - especially human life... That's why the Libertarian Party supports reproductive freedom of choice for Americans - whether they choose to reproduce using the traditional method, or artificial insemination, or in-vitro fertilization, or cloning... if cloning research is banned, millions of people could suffer." 
~  Steve Dasbach

"We're fighting for research, and we're defending people's reproductive rights... I realize my clone would be my identical twin, and my identical win has a right to be born."
~ Randolfe Wicker

"...In a time when we're afraid that discovery of a genetic basis [for homosexuality] would lead to people aborting us, cloning would be a way of surviving... this [cloning] has the potential of giving women complete control over reproduction... a stunning possibility that could, carried to its logical extreme, eliminate men altogether."
~ Ann Northrop
For the pros and cons of human cloning, visit
http://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article.php?id=282