Ethics of Human Cloning
The notion of having perfect genetic copies of ourselves, once
the stuff of science fiction, is heading toward fact and causing a
good deal of incendiary debate along the way. Critics say, "One
of me is quite enough, and one of Adolf Hitler was too many.
There's 5.4 billion of us. Why make more?" Initial discussions
both with swamis and families indicate unequivocally and
overwhelmingly that Hindus find the idea of replicating human
beings unnecessary, unethical and unthinkable. They recalled a
surprising number of cloning references in the old Indian tales.
Has it happened before? Could it happen in the future that we
would meet or even teach the dharma to dozens of copies of
ourselves? It gives new meaning to the Hindu ideal of seeing
ourselves in others.
Many religionists find it frightening to watch man tinkering
with God's universe. There's no user's manual, they fret. What
if we break something permanently? The Creator made it with
loving intent and divine intelligence, they offer, and it is
arrogant, foolhardy and downright sinful for people to play
God with something as profoundly consequential as the human
genetic instruction.
It is possible to understand such a prudent warning and still
disagree. While the argument makes sense with a Biblical God,
Hinduism does not separate man from God so completely. Man
is God; and God is man. Indian yogis and mystics speak of the
cocreative process of evolution. Man is not merely following a
distant Deity's decrees in fulfillment of the Divine Law; he is
engaged, alongside the Architect, in engineering that Law; or
you could say God is working His will through mankind,
including scientists.
There are two fundamental principles that every Hindu applies
to determination of right and wrong in questions of conduct or
conscience. The first is ahimsa, noninjury. The second is
nearness to God leading to moksha, spiritual liberation. Every
action, word or even thought is judged against these two
touchstones. Of course, the application of such broad
principles is open to interpretation. How much injury is
permissible to clone a person or find a cure for cancer? Some
would answer none, not even to laboratory animals. Other
Hindus postulate that the very search for a cure assumes that
cancer is an unnecessary evil, a crack in the universal machine
needing urgent repair. What of the purpose behind it all? What
of the need some have to experience cancer? Cancer is the
problem, says mind. How we confront cancer is the real issue,
says spirit. Are we looking for a perfect, death-defying body or
are we looking for soulful qualities derived from experiencing
life's joys and sufferings with wisdom and equanimity?
Most Hindu spiritual leaders we spoke to were less concerned
for the moral issues and casuistry surrounding human cloning
than for the practical need. Why do this? they asked. Will it
help us to draw nearer to God if we have such bodies? Will the
soul's evolution toward Self Realization be advanced one
millimeter? Will the inner consciousness be enhanced? They
think not.
But there are other voices. Some told us that a cloned body
might be useful. One noted that in ancient Greece, priests for
the temples were specially created by hypnotizing or drugging
two virgins and arranging for them to conceive a child. Because
that sexual encounter was passionless (there even remained no
memory of its having happened), it was said that their progeny
would be unworldly and dispassionate, qualities wanted in a
priest. Parallel instructions exist in ancient Indian texts,
explaining how to conceive a child of this nature or that, all
based on the thoughts and yogic practices of the parents during
coitus. If that is true, might not cloning, with its total
elimination of human sexuality, provide a physical-emotional
home for an advanced soul seeking an earthly passage of
solace, needing to live without emotion or powerful desires and
sentiments? And might not cloning bring us back to the Indian
ideal of a 120-year lifespan?
It's hard for passionate people in old-fashioned bodies to think
dispassionately about all this. Fears arise, evoking the spectre
of human farming, of armies of look-alike soldiers, of
avaricious organ sellers and irreconcilable questions of
inheritance, personhood and belonging. With all that complex
surrogacy, whose children are the clones, what happens to the
idea of family? In fact, human cloning is just the most recent
moral dillemma between conscience and science. We have
stood here before.
A short list will put the problem in perspective. In the 15th
century there was a terrible outcry when the first rifles and
pistols were made in Spain. Surely, we thought, this would
bring the end. When Karl Benz built the first automobile in
Germany in 1885, clergy thought it of the devil and condemned
it harshly. Many will remember the soul-searching that greeted
the first successful atomic bomb test at Alamogordo, New
Mexico, on July 16, 1945. When kidneys were first implanted
into humans in the 1960s and a heart in the 1980s, the moral
furor was universal and powerful. Ditto when man set foot on
the moon July 20, 1969, and again when British researchers
perfected in vitro fertilization of the human egg, leading to the
birth of Louise Brown, the world's first "test-tube baby,"
conceived outside the human body and born on July 25, 1978;
and again with surrogate mothers. You get the idea. Things that
at first seem unthinkable gradually become accepted. Who
today thinks of a test-tube infant as a freak or considers plane
travel to be against the natural order? Many did back then.
Hindus realize there are karmic consequences to every act,
including cloning. Would your parabdha karma--that which
rules the present life span--be impacted if a duplicate of your
body lived on 50 years, 100 or more beyond your death?
Would you, the soul, be held up in the astral plane, awaiting a
new birth indefinitely, lingering until your very-much-alive
physical body expired? Hindus consider that this life's karmas
are not complete until the body succumbs, and having a part of
the body remain alive could perhaps forestall freedom. If
cloning so impacts spiritual progress, we would certainly
approach it with circumspection.
Was it intuition that led Hindus to protect themselves from such
a fate by requiring cremation? No one can dig up a Hindu's
corpse and clone him or her from a piece of bone or skin. Not
true outside of Indian culture, where we can still find the grave
of a pharaoh or Isaac Newton or Elvis. Still, India preserved
her saints, for they are the only Hindus traditionally interred.
Did the rishis anticipate cloning millennia ago, and set up
principles that would assure only the bodies of the most
advanced souls would be cloned in some distant future?
Hmmm!
Editor
Hinduism-On-Line
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