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| P. O. Box 22100, Lexington, KY 40522 |
Phone: 859-255-5400
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The University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville vie for the ability to experiment on humans, and legislators say, "Yes."
by Martin Cothran
In last Friday’s vote against a ban on human cloning,
there was an irony that no one seemed to notice.
Not only did twenty-two senators vote to give the University of Kentucky
and the University of Louisville carte blanche to engage in unrestricted human
cloning, they laid the groundwork for the denial of human rights to any baby
that might be produced by the procedures they approved.
In the act of empowering people like Dr. Zavos, the
Lexington researcher who wants to produce babies through cloning, they made the
case, in their arguments, that any baby produced from Dr. Zavos’ mad science
should not be considered human.
The vote came on what could fairly be titled the “Zavos
Amendment,” sponsored by Louisville senator Tim Shaughnessy.
It neutered the entire cloning bill by saying that the law could not
prohibit anything that was not already prohibited in federal regulation.
But there are no federal regulations on cloning.
Therefore, the amended bill could prohibit nothing.
The Zavos Amendment took the nucleus out of the cloning
law.
The amendment not only took out the prohibition on
so-called “therapeutic” cloning, in which a human embryo is produced for
research purposes then destroyed, but it took out all prohibitions, including
those for reproductive cloning which, ironically, many of the people voting for
the amendment claim to abhor.
One senator argued that in order to be considered truly
human—to be considered as having a human soul—a person must have been the
product of the human fertilization process: the union of a sperm and an egg.
The product of any other process, he argued, could not be considered to
have a soul, and therefore could not be human.
The argument was made in a dramatic way.
The senator held up an Easter egg, representing a human egg.
Then he took a piece of liver, which, he said, represented the nucleus of
a cell that was taken from a human liver, which also did not have a soul.
He put the piece of liver into the Easter egg and closed it, and asked
how the thing produced by their combination—the egg with the nucleus of a
liver cell—could itself have a soul?
In other words, how could the product of two soulless
things produce a thing with a soul?
I was sitting in the gallery of the Senate when the senator
made his argument. I looked at the
people sitting around me and wondered whether they themselves were human, since
each one of them was produced by two things that did not have a soul: a sperm
and an egg.
Does anyone doubt that Dolly the Sheep is not a Sheep?
Or that CiCi the cat is not a cat? According
to this senator’s reasoning, they are not.
And a human produced in the same way will now be considered subhuman.
Another senator took this bizarre line of reasoning even
further and argued that human clones could not be considered human because they
were not the product of the love between a man and a woman.
Many of us probably weren’t aware that the level of our
humanity depended upon the emotional state of our parents at the time of our
conception.
But the truly frightening thing was not the irrationality
of these arguments, but their potential consequences. One of the fears of cloning opponents has been that humans
might be cloned and used for spare parts by other humans who happen to enjoy the
advantage of being produced by more conventional means.
Cloning proponents say that if an embryo is not the result
of the fertilization process, then it cannot be considered human.
But what if a baby is produced from such a cloned embryo, as is now
possible in Kentucky thanks to the Zavos Amendment?
What status will that child have, and to what purposes will
he or she be put by those whose logic leads them to consider him or her
subhuman?
But there is something more frightening still, and that is
that the arguments made by many of the cloning proponents were uttered in such
absolute earnestness.
The same senator who purported to solve the cloning issue
with an Easter egg and a piece of liver mentioned in his presentation that it
was a particular disabled child that he had recently met who had really changed
his mind about the cloning issue.
In the name of that one child—the one who changed the
senator’s mind about the cloning issue—many children who can now be produced
thanks to his vote have been dehumanized.
This issue will be back, and the same issue will confront us. Let’s hope we deal with them better than we did this time.