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Even these uses of cloning are fraught with ethical difficulties -- not the least of which is the assumption that a defective embryo will be discarded, an action that most right-to-life advocates equate with murder. Medical ethicists have worried for some time that advances in reproductive technology in the U.S. are proceeding in an ethical vacuum, one created not by the technology but by the politics of abortion. "Congress and our state legislatures are fearful of anything that gets them near the abortion debate," complained Caplan. "As a result, we have had no systematic discussion of surrogacy, of what to do with frozen embryos when parents die, of who can operate a fertility clinic. And we have had no systematic discussion of cloning."
As soon as Caplan heard the news from the American Fertility Society meeting, he phoned Gina Kolata, the reporter at the New York Times who broke the story. As a result, Caplan helped shape the discussion that followed. For example, although Hall's technique cannot produce more than two or three clones of any embryo, several stories written about his experiment included the scenario, put forward by Caplan and other ethicists, in which an infertility clinic offers prospective parents a catalog filled with children's photographs. Below each picture is a report on the child's academic and social achievement. Couples could choose from among the pictures, receive a frozen embryo, and then raise that child -- not a sibling or near relative -- but an exact genetic duplicate.
Or what about the couple that sets aside, as a matter of course, a clone of each of their children? If one of them died, the child could be replaced with a genetic equivalent. If another required a bone marrow or kidney transplant, a donor could be thawed and raised with tissues that are guaranteed to be 100% compatible. Or what if the couple just feels like having a third child that is more like their daughter than their son? By thawing out the corresponding embryo they could have a second daughter who would be a twin of the first, only several years younger. A couple for whom money was no object could give birth to the same child every few years. A woman could even give birth to her own twin, provided her parents had the foresight to preserve a clone of the embryo that produced her.
One doesn't have to be an ethicist to see the difficulties these situations could create. All parents know how hard it is to separate what they think a child ought to be from what he or she actually is. That difficulty would be compounded -- for both the parent and the child -- if an exact template for what that child could become in 10 or 20 years were before them in the form of an older sibling. "I think we have a right to our own individual genetic identity," said Daniel Callahan, director of the Hastings Center, an ethics- research organization in Briarcliff Manor, New York. "I think this could well violate that right."
Many of the uses envisioned for cloning are not particularly farfetched compared with things that are already happening. A few years ago, a California couple made a remarkable decision when faced with the news that their daughter was dying of leukemia. The father braved a vasectomy reversal and the mother a pregnancy at 43 to have a new child born for the express purpose of providing the bone-marrow transplant that saved the older child's life.