Genetic Cloning and the Sanctity of Life
A Word from Geoffrey Surtees
One might think that the recent talk regarding the eventual cloning of human beings throws the question of the sanctity of human life into a new light. It does not. Though we might be dealing here with a new area of bioethical consideration, we are not dealing with a new set of morally evaluative criteria. The same principles of faith and reason which tell us that in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood, and other means of "producing" children in scientific laboratories are immoral, apply as well to this latest technological innovation. In fact, it is the technology alone which makes the cloning procedure innovative; the notion that "you shall be as gods," and therefore usurp a privilege of God alone -- in this case, creation -- is as old as the temptation in the Garden of Eden.
The manner in which the human person is to be brought into being is disclosed for us through faith and reason. In cooperation with the sexual union and mutual self-giving of husband and wife -- a relation which mirrors the love of Christ for His Church -- God creates and calls forth a human person from nothingness (a far more awesome event than science could ever hope to concoct). And though the newly conceived child may inherit his genes and other biological data from his parents, his soul -- the unifying principle of the person -- is the work of God alone. The child is to be born of the indissoluble love of the two spouses, because it is this love which will nurture, educate, and rear the child for the benefit of society and for the glorification of God. To divorce the integral components that lie at the origin of the human perso -- man and God, procreation and marital love -- is to attempt to divorce the integral components of the human person himself: body and soul. Such a divorce has been tried before, in the materialism of the Enlightenment, and it is a divorce from which we continue to suffer.
The infamous German philosopher, Friedreich Nietzsche, wrote that the essence of the will to power lies in "the making of all things manipulable." Perhaps nothing manifests this idea more so than the cloning and reproduction of human beings. Why? Because it seeks to manipulate the very work of creation the Scriptures tell us is a "little lower than the angels" and declared by God to be "very good": human life itself. In as much as human life is a gift of God, it is sacred and inviolable, and therefore should not be subject to manipulation or denigration.
Though Genesis tells us that man was made from the dust to which he shall return, the "Book of Beginnings" also tells us that man is gifted with the very "breath" of God; that he has been made -- fearfully and wonderfully, as the Psalmist writes -- in the divine image of His Creator. Man lives, moves, and has his being in God. Before, then, we can be said to "belong" to others, even before we belong to ourselves, we belong to the one who "formed our inmost being" (Ps 139). Obviously, cloning blasphemes this sacredness. It seeks to eradicate the divine origins of the human person by reducing his spiritual and bodily unity ( corpore et anima unus) to a mere thing of atoms and cells. And if this is all he is, then what is to prevent his being used as a plaything in the hands of scientists and doctors? Indeed, what then is the difference between man and beast?
Some years back science tempted us with in vitro fertilization, and our culture gave way; we were tempted by surrogate motherhood, and our culture gave way. Now, we face the temptation of genetic cloning. Let us now reassert the sanctity of life and not allow our culture to give way again.
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