What to call human cloning: the technical terminology increasingly used in the cloning debate sidesteps the ethical questions raised.

Abstract

On April 4, 2002, the Italian physician Severino Antinori announced that a woman was 8 weeks pregnant with a cloned human fetus (Daniel, 2002). On April 15, 2002, Brigitte Boisselier, scientific director of Clonaid, a firm linked to the Raelian movement, announced that they had developed human clones to the blastocyst stage and planned to implant them into women. Later that month, Antinori told Italian state television that three cloned pregnancies existed in the world at that moment, two in Russia and one in an Islamic state. If these claims prove to be true, and the fetuses survive full‐term, debates over the ethics of human cloning will no longer be theoretical exercises. We will have to consider how we treat cloned humans. > One controversial and morally questionable action—embryo destruction—is being used to justify another controversial and morally questionable action—human cloning Judging by the vociferous condemnation of these reports, most people regard human cloning as immoral and would like to outlaw the procedure. On April 10, 2002, US President George W. Bush urged the US Senate to ban human cloning completely because it treats human life as a commodity, and stated that ‘no human life should be exploited or extinguished for the benefit of another’. The US Senate is closely divided on the issue of cloning and although it is expected to ban ‘reproductive cloning’, it is still debating whether to allow research involving 'therapeutic cloning’. While both these terms remain widely used, some scientists are urging their abandonment because of the negative public response they generate. Indeed, in a recent report, the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) chose to call therapeutic cloning ‘nuclear transplantation to produce stem cells’ (NAS, 2002). This exemplifies the desire on the part of some within the scientific community to eliminate the term ‘cloning’ from …