By Randolfe Wicker
Human Cloning will Transform Family Life and Create New Forms of
Social Relationships.
Human Cloning will Greatly Increase Medicine's Curative Powers.
Human Cloning will make Every Individual Fertile and Increase their
Reproductive Options Regardless of Marital Status.
Human Cloning will Force All Religions to Redefine Family, Life,
Parenthood and Even Immortality
Who Will Use the New Reproductive Technology? How will it
Transform Family Life & Create New Forms of Social
Relationships?
 Traditional married couples who
discover that either the husband's or wife's ancestral medical history is
riddled with schizophrenia, lupus, diabetes or some other inheritable
disease may choose to conceive their children by cloning the healthier
mate.
Cloning will also allow every infertile couple, single female or
male with parenting impulses to have children without involving the genes
of a stranger. Any such child would be a later-born twin of the individual
or spouse cloned.
A son or daughter who is one parent's later-born identical twin
would probably share a special compatibility with the parent cloned. The
other spouse would likely find those genetically-based traits shared by
both the child and his/her spouse most agreeable.
| Lesbian
couples could share parenting. Each could bear her mate's later-born
twin. Each resulting child would be both the physical daughter of
one and the later-born twin of the other.
Male homosexuals, some of whom harbor intense parenting
urges, could – with much greater difficulty and expense--have
later-born twin sons using paid surrogate mothers.
Women, many of whom choose to be single parents, could have
their own eggs fertilized by insertion of one of their own cells and
thereby bear daughters who will likewise be later-born identical
twins. |
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Related
Sites:
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The resulting close and understanding relationships between them
could be particularly binding. A daughter-mother twin might find
traditional heterosexual courtship unappealing compared to life with
mother.
She might decide to continue living at home with mom, bear a third
generation twin through cloning and share rearing with her mother. Such
shared parenting is common among single parents and those who have
divorced.
The only difference would be that, for the first time in human
mammalian history, we'd actually have three generations constituting
same-sex families.
Multiple cloning, which is still a "politically incorrect"
minefield even among those few enlightened voices speaking up for human
cloning, will occur. However, they will be infrequent.
The fertility clinic in California which offered Nobel Laureate
sperm donors found that very few people were interested.
Human beings want their own children – children genetically related
to themselves. This preference is so strong that infertile couples spend
thousands of dollars per try, sometimes squandering a hundred thousand
dollars financing IVF and other efforts that ultimately help only one out
of four couples regardless of the number of repeated attempts and expenses
involved.
Today's popularized science fiction fantasy foresees mad dictators
enslaving hundreds or thousands of unwilling female subjects to bear
later-born twins of himself –or an army of supermen. "Real life" scenarios
will be both more humane and democratic.
 The closest example of an acceptable (almost popular)
circumstance validating human cloning today involves replacing a lost
child through cloning a later-born twin. In my opinion, this is one of a
very few extreme circumstances where cloning opponents hypothesized fears
that "compromised identity problems" would plague "any" child conceived
through cloning might actually be applicable.
Some parents may be so pleased with one child, and unhappy with
their other(s), they might chose to have one or more later-born twins of
their favorite.
Multiple cloning might occur on a larger scale, producing a dozen
or a hundred later-born twins of a widely admired genius like Albert
Einstein or Bertrand Russell, a talented musician like Beethoven or John
Lennon, a creative master of writing or cinema like Vladimir Nabokov or
Steven Spielberg.
Cloning technology could be abused by cultists like Waco's Branch
Davidian leader David Koresh. Koresh forbade all sex, even between married
couples, in his 150-member compound.
All female members, including 13-year-old virgins, were only
allowed to have sexual intercourse with Koresh. Many of the children
consumed in flames with him were sired by him.
Multiple cloning, something I alone among today's cloning champions
advocate, would create interesting and positive new relationships in our
social culture.
Ten, twenty or a hundred identical twins, each a unique individual
human being—some just infants, others still teenagers and some mature
adults—would all share the same genotype.
Genetics, while not the sole definer of individual personality and
physical health, has been found to shape color preferences, traits
(shyness currently being the most recognized 'inheritable' one) as well as
verbal, intellectual and artistic abilities.
Multiple twins, despite their disparate nurturing and experiential
backgrounds, would share a special ability to understand one another and a
greatly enhanced capacity to communicate with one another.
They would comprise a type of "genetic family clan." Even if they
were scattered across the continent, even around the globe, they would
seek each other out. Quite possibly some groups would have an annual
clan-family get together.
Should one of the clan twins become orphaned through the tragic
loss of the adult parents, their clan-family would be an invaluable
resource for adoption and support.
Each of the four statements listed under Human Cloning: A
Promising Cornucopia deserve book length exploration. This brief
focus on how "human cloning will transform family life and create new
forms of social relationships" speaks for itself. Stay tuned for
provocative examinations of the next three points.
Randolfe Wicker founded New York's Clone Rights United
Front, the world's first activist organization championing cloning as
the reproductive right of every human being, just days after Dolly's
appearance in February, 1997. He has defended human cloning, testifying
before both national and state congressional committees. He also serves on
the board of Atlanta's Human Cloning Foundation.
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