On The Third Hand
A Proud member of the Brigade of Bellicose WomenThe liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. — Samuel Adams
| On The Third HandA Proud member of the Brigade of Bellicose WomenThe liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. — Samuel Adams |
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26 November, 2001: "Morals vs Medicine"By Kathy Kinsley According to Bush, cloning is "morally wrong". The Pope agrees with him. I think perhaps we need to keep in mind that some things also considered morally wrong in the past were: dissection of cadavers, use of anesthetic for women in childbirth, transplants and in-vitro fertilization. All of these things have happened anyway, and society has benefited from them. While there may be some ethical considerations to cloning human beings, we are a long way from that. Despite "moral" claims to the contrary, six stem cells are not a human being. There are some interesting issues about "property" that do need to be looked at carefully, before we get there. Tony Adragna, in his "From Left Field" points out that we should be careful not to allow any patents on unaltered genes or undifferentiated stem cells. He says: "This is the slippery slope that leads toward clones being classed as "property", and I don't trust some future Supreme Court to uphold constitutional rights for clones after the tradition has already developed. We can strike a balance between science and ethics that doesn't involve a ban on cloning, but it requires not allowing any notion of "proprietary rights" to develop into doctrine in this context, and we should start now." He does have a good point, there might be people who will someday consider a human being produced by cloning to be "unnatural" and "not really human". Probably some of the same ones who are presently calling the cloning of six cells "immoral". That we do need to forestall.
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