Eugenics

Ever since the news about Dolly was released, there has since been an on-going debate about the moral and ethic problems that cloning present. Before going in on think about this while reading the rest of this paper. There are two people in the hospital both require liver transplants. One patient has a clone and all that needs to be done is remove the clone liver and place it in his/her body. Since it is a clone there will be no need to worry about the body rejecting the new liver. The other patient does not have a clone and must wait for another person to die and donate their liver to them. Not only must the person's liver be compatible with the new body, the patient must hope that the body does not reject the foreign liver. Already, most of the major world health organizations and a number of governments have moved to ban such cloning in order to prevent a reoccurrence of the kind of wrongheaded thinking which would use cloning to build armies or create a super-race.

For example, France and Germany have called for total bans on human cloning, citing the precedents of the Nazi past the dangers of abuse of the process. Germany, in fact, has a ban on cloning in place. In the United States, there are bills pending in both houses of Congress to ban cloning. Various States have also proposed legislation banning further testing or research into human cloning. In addition, the World Health Organization, a part of the United Nations, has called for a total ban, as has the Vatican. Yet at the same time it is accepted that someone somewhere will try to clone a human being. The main reason being that it is against God's will and that it is immoral. The other reason is that people are concerned with and remember the Nazi's idea for a master race. Let's start with the second reason that is the fear that someone would try to build a master race. This dream or theory has been around for a long time. Before cloning the term used was eugenics. Which is concerned with the social direction of human evolution.

A distinction is made between positive and negative eugenics. Positive eugenics aims to increase reproduction of individuals who have traits, such as high intelligence and physical strength or fitness, which are considered to be valuable to society. Negative eugenics seeks to decrease reproduction among people believed to be inferior or below average mentally and physically. Cloning for better humanity, then, is normally associated with positive eugenics. Overall, since the Nazi experience, eugenics as a movement has been largely discredited, but the ideas still linger and many of the same arguments for cloning humans are used today, but with protests that they are not related to the abuses of the Eugenics proponents of the 1920s and 30s. The goal of eugenics was to create a superior human being, and with this creation, to in time create a superior human race humanity (Kluger and Thompson). The First International Congress for Eugenics was held in 1912 in London. Rather than being a fringe movement, it was hailed by a number of luminaries of the day. For example, Charles Darwin's son presided, while Winston Churchill led the British delegation. Among the Americans present were the presidents of Harvard and Stanford universities and Alexander Graham Bell. The Germans present advocated "racial hygiene," which later became Nazi policy.

According to historian Stefan Kuhl, German eugenicists enjoyed a special relationship with their counterparts from the United States ("Nazi Eugenic"). The beliefs of these groups contain elements that are still being brought up in discussions of cloning humans. They included trust that selective breeding and choice of genetic traits is an effective means of improving the overall quality of the human species (Lifton 301). In the early Thirties, it was believed that the race, indeed the world, needed to be purified of those elements of humanity that would bring the breeding pool down. Forced sterilization was one means of accomplishing this goal. Euthanasia, the killing of people for the greater good, was also a means of purging the world of inferior people. Germany adopted a sterilization law in 1933, which made people feeble-mindedness, blindness and deafness, grave bodily deformity, and hereditary alcoholism subject to forced sterilization for the good of the people (Allen). Today many of these same subjects are being addressed with therapeutic abortions and genetics counseling. In the 1920s and 30s, many scientists enthusiastically thought that they could and should apply genetics and population science to political issues. Even without the possibility of actually creating human beings, they saw the potential for controlling where humanity would go and what kind of people should be allowed to be made (Stienberg, M. L.185).

A related problem is that what traits a culture values are not fixed. They change with the nature of the economy and technology, as well as with fashion. Two hundred years ago, society would have favored the cloning of men with strong backs and women who were built for childbearing since those were the physical types needed to open a new land. Yet today the need is to understand technology, so brainpower would be more valuable. There are two general possibilities in today's society for cloning abuses: first is the abuse, which would be fostered by groups or governments and second is the abuses, which would be done by individuals for their own personal reasons. The examples of the Eugenics Movements and the Nazi policies fall into the former category (Dunn, Douglas). Because of the horrors already displayed there and the evil attached to them, the chances of wide scale governmental cloning are less likely. The reason to look at the second reason before the first is that the second reason would take more time to explain.

The first reason against cloning is because it's against God's will and that it is immoral. A person could argue all day about what is God's will and what is moral or immoral. But it all comes down to what that person believes. So to say something is against God or immoral is really just saying that you believe it to be so. For your thoughts and beliefs are your own. This is one thing that God has given to man, the ability to think and to create. So if this is against the will of God, why did the good lord allow us to create this idea, or for that matter put this idea into practice. This may not be very much to say about this reason, but think of this. God said go forth and multiply; he did not say how to multiply. Last lets take word the cloning as defined by Webster. Cloning the technique of producing a genetically identical duplicate of an organism by replacing the nucleus of an unfertilized ovum with the nucleus of a body cell from the organism. The word human is not in the definition. Why, to we assume that when we talk about the study of cloning that we are talking about the cloning of human beings. What would it be worth if the study of cloning could be used to increase the world's food supply? What would it be worth if only parts of a person's body could be cloned? Remember the two patients in the hospital they could both have new livers without the fear of rejection or the knowledge that someone had to die for them to live.