A new report from the Witherspoon Council on Ethics and the Integrity of Science forcefully makes the case against all forms of human cloning. Below is an excerpt from the report on the moral case against cloning-to-produce-children and cloning-for-biomedical research.

The debate over cloning-to-produce-children is chiefly a debate about a moral vision of the family that is increasingly widely held, one in which reproduction is seen as a freely chosen project of autonomous adults. More and more, this view is supplanting the traditional image of the family, in which romantic love between a man and a woman is tied together with marriage and the begetting of children.

The new moral image of the family, based on a doctrine of reproductive liberty, is an appealing one for a liberal society. The importance of freely made choice in this image of the family reflects the way philosophers sometimes imagine the structure and origins of liberal society: as autonomous individuals freely entering into contracts with one another to advance or defend their interests. This image of the family was perhaps most evocatively expressed in the Supreme Court’s 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey ruling, which extolled the importance of every individual being able to “define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” through access to technologies and techniques that add to their reproductive autonomy (in that particular case, abortion).

Read the article “The Public Case Against Human Cloning” on thepublicdiscourse.com.