Human cloning is a means of reproduction (in the most literal sense), and so the most plausible moral right at stake in its use is a right to reproductive freedom or procreative liberty (Robertson 1994a; Brock 1994). Reproductive freedom includes not only the familiar right to choose not to reproduce, for example by means of contraception or abortion, but also the right to reproduce. The reproductive right relevant to human cloning is a negative right, that is, a right to use assisted reproductive technologies without interference by the government or others when made available by a willing provider. The choice of an assisted means of reproduction, such as surrogacy, can be defended as included within reproductive freedom, even when it is not the only means for individuals to reproduce, just as the choice among different means of preventing conception is protected by reproductive freedom. However, the case for permitting the use of a particular means of reproduction is strongest when that means is necessary for particular individuals to be able to procreate at all. Sometimes human cloning could be the only means for individuals to procreate while retaining a biological tie to the child created, but in other cases different means of procreating would also be possible.
We shall evaluate these other ethical objections to it below.
When individuals have alternative means of procreating, human cloning typically would be chosen because it replicates a particular individual’s genome. The reproductive interest in question then is not simply reproduction itself, but a more specific interest in choosing what kind of children to have. The right to reproductive freedom is usually understood to cover at least some choice about the kind of children one will have; for example, genetic testing of an embryo or fetus for genetic disease or abnormality, together with abortion of an affected embryo or fetus, are now used to avoid having a child with that disease or abnormality. Genetic testing of prospective parents before conception to determine the risk of transmitting a genetic disease is also intended to avoid having children with particular diseases. Prospective parents’ moral interest in self-determination, which is one of the grounds of a moral right to reproductive freedom, includes the choice about whether to have a child with a condition that is likely to place severe burdens on them and cause severe burdens to the child itself. The more a reproductive choice is not simply the determination of oneself and one’s own life but the determination of the nature of another, as in the case of human cloning, the more moral weight the interests of that other person, that is, the cloned child, should have in decisions that determine its nature (Annas 1994). But even then parents are typically taken properly to have substantial, but not unlimited, discretion in shaping the persons their children will become, for example, through education and other childrearing decisions. Even if not part of reproductive freedom, the right to raise one’s children as one sees fit, within limits mostly determined by the interests of the children, is also a right to determine within limits what kinds of persons one’s children will become. This right includes not just preventing certain diseases or harms to children, but selecting and shaping desirable features and traits in one’s children. The use of human cloning is one way to exercise that right. It’s worth pointing out that current public and legal policy permits prospective parents to conceive, or to carry a conception to term, when there is a significant risk, or even certainty, that the child will suffer from a serious genetic disease. Even when others think the risk or presence of genetic disease makes it morally wrong to conceive, or to carry a fetus to term, the parents’ right to reproductive freedom permits them to do so. Most possible harms to a cloned child that I shall consider below are less serious than the genetic harms with which parents can now permit their offspring to be conceived or born. I conclude that there is good reason to accept that a right to reproductive freedom presumptively includes both a right to select the means of reproduction, as well as a right to determine what kind of children to have, by use of human cloning. If there is such a right, it would presumably be violated by a legal prohibition of research on human cloning, although the government could still permissibly decide not to spend public funds to support such research. My discussion in what follows will principally concern the moral issues in the use of human cloning, not those restricted to research on it.
