From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri Apr 27 2001 - 22:35:55 MDT
I just said:
>Maybe, whenever possible in conversation, change the meme to:
>
>US bill to ban twins.
But actually that's a two-edged sword. Careful, careful!
The objection to *therapeutic* cloning is precisely (and erroneously) that
the stem cells being tweaked *are* twins; that is, are innocent little wee
persons being butchered.
I regard this as a literally insane interpretation, but many people will
cling to it for a long time yet. We need somehow to convey that
(a) cloning a child is not a monstrous Frankenstein act of demented hubris
and narcissism
(except when it *is* the latter, of course, but then so too are many
conventional sexual acts of reproduction),
and (2) reshaping a stem cell has no more moral gravity than trimming a
toenail
(except when the toenail cell is morphed into an embryo and grown to
term--proving yet again how circumstantial and context-dependent all these
issues are).
Damien Broderick
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