Summary: In addition to moral and ethical issues, human cloning raises concerns
regarding the rights of parents and cloned children, as well as the reliability of DNA testing.
The issue of human cloning has raised numerous moral and ethical issues. In addition to these
philosophical concerns, however, the possibility of human cloning raises several key legal issues
surrounding individual rights and the administrability of the law.
The most immediate legal concern is whether any government regulation or prohibition of human cloning
infringes on any existing legal rights, as was alleged by a Pennsylvania couple in a federal suit
against the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center. In that case,
the couple claimed that the federal ban on human cloning violated their right to privacy. The lawsuit
was an attempt to broaden privacy rights so that any reproductive decision, even the decision to have
a cloned child, would be protected as much as the right to abortion or contraception. Because human
cloning was not possible at the time of the suit, however, the district court held that the couple
could not have been denied any rights by the federal ban on human cloning. Accordingly, the district
court did not reach the constitutionality of the federal cloning ban. Nonetheless, since it is
widely believed that human cloning will someday be possible, presumably the stage is set for a
constitutional attack on any attempts by the government to regulate or prohibit the process.
Approaching the issue from the opposite end, the concern then turns to the rights of a cloned
child. The fact that Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal, was recently euthanized at age
6 after being diagnosed with arthritis and progressive lung diseases has raised fears that cloning
process had caused her to age prematurely. Presumably, cloning technology has advanced in the
past six years, but the fact remains that if and when a cloned human is born, there may be
unforeseen and potentially disastrous side effects. Whether the cloned child ages prematurely
or has some other defect or deformity resulting from the cloning process, the question will
arise as to whom the child can hold liable for his suffering. Although the tort of "wrongful
life" is generally unavailable in the U.S., the moral and ethical issues surrounding the act of
creating a human being through an experimental scientific process might prompt courts and
legislatures to allow some sort of recovery on the part of the injured clone.
Even assuming the cloning process is perfected and clones are born healthy, there is also the
issue of stigmatization and exploitation of clones. Following Clonaid's recent claim that they
have, in fact, created a human clone, a Florida attorney filed paperwork to have a guardian
appointed for the cloned baby. The attorney claims he wants to protect the child from being
exploited by Clonaid. But even after the novelty of human cloning wears off and human clones
are no longer subject to excessive press coverage, the risk remains that society will reject
clones as unnatural or otherwise undesirable, thereby subjecting clones to harsh treatment
and discrimination. Clones could conceivably be identified as a minority group and thus
granted special privileges and protections by the government. It remains to be seen what the
life experiences of human clones will entail.
A final, and perhaps fanciful, issue surrounding human cloning concerns criminal law and
paternity tests. The claim is that cloning, by generating exact genetic duplicates, will
undermine the effectiveness of DNA testing. If multiple "copies" of the same person are
generated, seminal fluid or another DNA sample will point to multiple suspects. Although
this problem is mitigated by the fact that the existence of identical twins (which are also
exact genetic duplicates) has failed to destroy DNA testing, this problem shows that there
will be numerous unintended legal consequences of human cloning which must be prepared for.
For Additional Reading:
http://www.cnn.com/2002/LAW/12/31/human.cloning.guardian/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2002/LAW/12/31/findlaw.analysis.hilden.cloning/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/02/14/cloned.dolly.dies/index.html
http://www.courttv.com/news/feature/clonecrime.html
http://www.clonaid.com
