Human Cloning. Is It Ethical

Human Cloning, Is it Ethical Human cloning is and has been the subject of moral debate in the United States and around the world, and because of this it has raised many ethical questions. One thing that I do have in common with our previous president Bush is his principle that it is unethical to create human life for destroying it. I never thought about human cloning and its relevance until I watched the movie, called The Island. The Island is a sci-fi action thriller that reportedly cost about $120 million to make. Its powerful message is against creating human life in a laboratory and it truly came through loud and clear despite the ingenious and noisy special effects. The Island tells the story of a government-funded billion-dollar laboratory hidden in the Arizona desert in 2019 where scientists do cloning on a mass scale. They sell $5 million "insurance policies" to rich people who want to live forever by buying replacement body parts. The scientists agree to follow ethical guidelines in their cloning, and falsely tell their customers that the clones are in a "vegetative state" unable to know or feel anything. Nevertheless, the scientists get better results by violating the guidelines and so they go to extraordinary lengths to keep secret the very existence of their adult clones as well as the whole operation. After watching the movie I do understand why on April 2002, President Bush warned that cloning will lead to experimental human beings, "embryo farms," and "a society in which human beings are grown for spare body parts and children are engineered to custom specifications.” The Island dramatizes the truth of his prediction.

This movie left me with several questions that plague me still today. For instance, if human cloning technology were safe and widely available, what use would they have for it and what reasons would they have to use it? If scientists were capable of cloning without failure, what would the welfare of the clones be