Cloning

“Your eyes saw me when I was formless; all my days were written in your book and planned before a single one of them began.”

— Psalm 139:16 (NIV)

Cloning is the production of a genetically identical organism from a single cell, by a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer, rather than through the union of a sperm and an egg. Reproductive cloning aims to bring the resulting embryo to birth; research cloning, sometimes called therapeutic cloning, creates the embryo only to destroy it for its stem cells, with no intention of implantation.¹ Both begin the same way, by forming a distinct, living human embryo, and the dignity Scripture ascribes to every human being does not depend on how that embryo came to exist (Ps. 139:13-16).

Confessional Witness

The 1689 London Baptist Confession, written three centuries before cloning existed as a technology, does not name it. Two of its chapters bear on the question it raises.

The Confession states that God created man and woman “being made after the image of God, in knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness,” with reasonable and immortal souls.² Nothing in that formulation makes the image contingent on the manner of a person’s conception; a human being produced by cloning would bear it the same as any other.

The Confession also states that marriage was ordained “for the mutual help of husband and wife, for the increase of mankind with a legitimate issue, and the preventing of uncleanness.”³ This places procreation, “the increase of mankind,” within marriage’s own union of husband and wife, not as a free-standing technological process available apart from it.

Biblical Basis

Scripture grounds human dignity in nothing more particular than God’s own act of creating: “God created man in his own image… male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27). Psalm 139 extends that status back before birth, to the formless embryo God already knows and has planned for (Ps. 139:13-16). Marriage is where God ordained procreation to take place, through the “one flesh” union of a man and his wife (Gen. 2:24); procreation is a central purpose of that marital union, accomplished through it rather than as a separable output that can be pursued by other means.⁴

None of these texts addresses cloning by name, since Scripture does not speak directly to a technology it never anticipated. Christian ethics has to reason from what Scripture teaches about human nature and procreation to a new case like this one, rather than looking for a verse that names it outright.⁵

Historical Development

In 1997, Leon Kass responded to the prospect of human cloning with an essay titled “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” warning that “we are faced with having to decide nothing less than whether human procreation is going to remain human.”⁶

What perfecting the technology would actually require became clearer through the following decade. David A. Prentice, a cell biologist and adult stem-cell researcher, told Wesley J. Smith in 2003 that safely cloning a human being to birth would mean cloning thousands of embryos to the blastocyst stage and destroying each one to study the process, then transferring cloned embryos into surrogate mothers and terminating the resulting “clonal pregnancies” at various stages of development for analysis, before any attempt at a live birth could even be considered responsible.¹ Interviewed again in 2015, Prentice told Smith the assessment “still applies today.”⁷

In 2013, researchers reported the first successful derivation of human embryonic stem cells by cloning, using cells from a young girl with a genetic disorder.⁸ An unexpected finding accompanied it: success depended less on the donor of the cloned cell than on the genetic quality of the egg used, meaning that scaling up human cloning research would require recruiting large numbers of women as egg donors, a burden Smith argues would fall disproportionately on poorer women in a global market for eggs.⁹

Opposing Views

Some bioethicists reject the premise that dignity belongs to human beings simply because they are human. Alasdair Cochrane calls this premise “arbitrary and unhelpful” and proposes instead an “undignified bioethics” that grounds moral status in an individual’s capacities, such as personhood, rather than species membership.¹⁰

Transhumanist writers go further, treating cloning as one welcome technology among several, alongside in vitro fertilization and genetic modification, that could move reproduction away from ordinary procreation. Kyle Munkittrick envisions a future in which such technologies let “the child with the best possibility of a good life to be born,” with childbearing increasingly subject to legal regulation rather than left to chance.¹¹

Objections and Responses

Research cloning never intends to bring a child to birth, so it isn’t comparable to destroying a human being. The argument that grounds human dignity in what an embryo is, not in what researchers plan to do with it, does not depend on that intention: “It is not our respect that gives them dignity; rather, it is because they have dignity that we owe them respect.”¹² A cloned embryo created only to be destroyed for its stem cells is still, on this reasoning, a human being deliberately brought into existence and deliberately destroyed.

Once reproductive cloning can be done safely, any moral problem with the process used to develop it disappears. On Prentice’s account, safety is not a threshold reached apart from destructive trial and error: cloning and destroying large numbers of embryos and terminating clonal pregnancies is part of how the technique would have to be developed, not an accident better technique could avoid.¹³

Cloning is really just another reproductive technology, continuous with in vitro fertilization and other assisted reproduction many Christians already accept. Kass’s response is that cloning changes the kind of question at stake, not merely its degree: whether procreation continues to happen through the union of a man and woman, as marriage was ordained for, or becomes the asexual replication of a single existing genome.¹⁴

Related Doctrines

References

Wesley J. Smith, Culture of Death: The Age of Do Harm Medicine, 2nd ed. (New York: Encounter Books, 2016), chap. 6, “Biological Colonialism.” ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 4, “Of Creation,” para. 2. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 25, “Of Marriage,” para. 2. ↩
Ken Magnuson, Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2020), chap. 11, “Infertility and Assisted Reproductive Technologies”: “A central purpose of marriage is procreation. God’s intention in creation is to bless human beings with procreative fruitfulness through the union of man and woman in marriage.” ↩
Magnuson, chap. 5, “Aspects of Biblical Ethics: New Testament.” ↩
Leon R. Kass, “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” in Leon R. Kass and James Q. Wilson, The Ethics of Human Cloning (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1998), 12, quoted in Smith, chap. 7, “Toward a ‘Human Rights’ Bioethics.” ↩
Smith, chap. 6. ↩
Masahito Tachibana et al., “Human Embryonic Stem Cells Derived by Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer,” Cell 153 (June 6, 2013): 1228-1238, discussed in Smith, chap. 6. ↩
Smith, chap. 6. ↩
Alasdair Cochrane, “Undignified Bioethics,” Bioethics (December 2009): 234-241, quoted in Smith, chap. 1, “Harsh Medicine.” ↩
Kyle Munkittrick, “When Will We Be Transhuman?,” Discover, July 16, 2011, quoted in Smith, chap. 7. ↩
Megan Best, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made: Ethics and the Beginning of Human Life (Kingsford, Australia: Matthias Media, 2012), quoted in Magnuson, chap. 10, “Bioethics and Human Personhood: The Case of the Human Embryo.” ↩
Smith, chap. 6. ↩
Smith, chap. 7. ↩