---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 05 Mar 1997 04:20:40 GMT
From: Howard Olson <holson@california.com>
To: "bionet.neuroscience mail newsgroup" <bionet-news@dl.ac.uk>
Subject: Clinton vs human cloning : Pres ignores self-ownership
In a blatant display of political oportunism, President Clinton shows
a sudden concern for ethics. He presumes to impose archaic
authoritarian religious views in an attack on the forefront of modern
science and the basis of all human rights : self-ownership.
Pandering to the worst reactionary authoritarian statist elements of
the Millenium, Clinton seeks a "commission" { an Inquisition is more
like it) to study human cloning.
Clinton and those he seeks to appease on the statist Left & Right
ignore the simple human fact of self-ownership. If human beings do not
have the right to clone themselves they do not have the right to
reproduce in any form without government consent. The level of
techonology is irrelevant to the simple fact that humans have the
right to dispose of their own tissue in any way they see fit. The
alternative is state-ownership of human beings. This is unconscionable
both ethically and scientifically.
Basic laws protect the rights of humans from enslavement that
opponents of human cloning pretend to fear in their simplistic
propaganda. In reality, authoritarians of both the right and the left
seek control over human life. Rulers and would-be rulers seek to use
the issue of cloning to establish the principle of state-ownership of
human life.
Niether scientists nor the public can allow this to happen. We need to
have freedom to experiment so that viruses and all other infectious
agents can be defeated as fast (or hopeully faster) than they can
evolve. Limiting the rights of people to donate their tissue to
medical science for these or any other purposes is to doom humanity to
death from emergent viral and other pathogenic infections.
Biotechnology and medicine in other areas may al;so benefit from human
cloning in ways we cannot even imgaine now.
But , most importanly, banning human cloning will establish the right
of the State to control human reproduction and human life in toto, by
establishing the precedent created by such a law as Clinton and others
are seeking.
Howard R. Olson, MA
Bioethicist