I see that, according to Maggie Farley of the L.A. Times, the Bush administration, with the aid of around five dozen small countries with "strong Catholic or Muslim majorities," wants the U.N. to sponsor a global treaty banning: (a) human cloning; and (b) stem cell research.
The argument, of course, is that one purpose of cloning, so-called "therapeutic cloning," results in the taking of human life, which is "unethical and morally reproachable," an argument which, coming from the perpetrator on Iraq of "shock and awe," should be noted for what it is: hypocritical. Still, for those of us who had little or no use for "shock and awe," it deserves attention, no matter who uses it.
This is pretty much the same argument we see from the self-styled "pro-life" camp with respect to abortion: life begins at conception, and is sacred. This is also a hypocritical argument, at least if it comes from somebody who has ever eaten at Sizzler's (even if they've only visited the salad bar: shrimp, tuna and artichokes, too, are living things, and heaven help the pro-lifer who's ever put chopped egg on his salad ...).
The self-styled "pro-choice" camp, or at least certain of its members, may respond that, in fact, life only sets in at some time later, and so early termination is perfectly legitimate. This, too, is a spurious argument. In fact, life does not begin at conception, but a considerable time before ― would anybody argue that those swarming sperm cells, racing down that duct towards that defenseless egg, are not alive? Heck, the chain of life that leads to every single blastocyte could, if you had the ability to travel in time, be traced back at least a billion years, and probably more. No question, that fertilized egg is alive. The real question is: when does human life begin? A human being ― well, at least his sentience ― pretty definitely has starting and stopping points.
Question may be posed in two ways: When is the body ensouled? or, When does sentience set in? The first, of course, assumes that the "soul" is restricted to human beings. Anybody who has ever lived with a dog or a cat may have leave to doubt this, of course; and in any case, no one that I know of has ever succeeded in demonstrating the existence of a soul in a court of law, even in a full-grown human being. Let us then restrict ourselves to sentience. At what point in the development of sentience should the fetus become sacrosanct? Well, it's still considered proper to drown unwanted kittens ― at what point does a human fetus pass the developmental stage of a drownable kitten? I don't know, but it's certainly well beyond the stage at which "therapeutic cloning" for the purpose of harvesting stem cells is terminated. So it looks to me as though there's no ethical or moral harm ― at least when compared to other actions that modern society deems permissible ― in that sort of therapeutic cloning.
Foreign Minister Roberto Tovar of Costa Rica, of course, points out the potential dangers of such activities. For example, he warns of the potential danger of exploiting women as "egg-making factories." This isn't a spurious danger, of course; such things have already happened (rarely) to women who have surrendered their eggs for in vitro fertilization, a recognized and accepted technology in this early 21st century. Any system is subject to abuses; rarely do we permit the mere possibility of such abuses to deter us from initiating a useful system such as therapeutic cloning.
More dangerous is the fact that the term therapeutic cloning could easily be extended not just to stem-cell research but to the production of full-grown clones, human beings who would be seen not as individuals in their own right but as sources of easily harvestable organs, tissues and liquids to maintain their "progenitors" in good health. This would be a detestable use of cloning, but could be avoided (I won't say "easily" ― money always talks, particularly in a world where slavery is practiced even in countries where it is considered illegal such as the United States) by laws recognizing all clones as individual human beings, distinct from their progenitors and with all the rights and responsibilities of humans who come straight out of the womb, just as is the case now for identical twins, which are, for all intents and purposes, identical to clones.
In fact, far more dangerous than human cloning (which is considered, for reasons I have never understood, as intrinsically unethical) is the cloning of other species, plant and animal, to increase production. While human clones will always have interested advocates to at least minimize their abuse and the abuse of human cloning, plants and animals have no such advocates; and in the long run, the least we can expect is a reduction in genetic diversity within commercially useful species as clones of the most "useful" individuals in the species replace naturally born individuals. The worst we can expect, of course ― and in the long run, it's almost inevitable ― is the extinction of several such species when some disease or blight hits that would have minimal or temporary effect on a genetically diverse species but maximum and permanent effect on a species with no genetic diversity.
Maybe the U.N. should sponsor a treaty banning cloning of tomatoes, corn or sheep? Don't expect the Bush administration to support it, however.