Abortion Clone Wars: Darwin, Ethics, Technology

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Clone | Photo 02

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uploaded by James Keith

I am calling this a coffee shop report. A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to meet a few young Republican and Democrat travelers in Michigan’s state capitol, Lansing at a well known restaurant and bar called Troppo. The group started to talk about the hot topics of the day, but we always came back to, abortion, and goods/evils of the practice as it exists today. I found myself more fascinated with the practices of tomorrow and how technology would affect the phenomena.

Darwin founded and elaborated on the idea that natural selection deemed every living being to be fit to exist. For the next century this philosophical standard reigned supreme, and it still makes good sense to lots of people today. What about 21st century technology? In 1996 Dolly was successfully cloned from a Scottish sheep and in 2003 after 237 attempts and Prometea was successfully cloned from a Texan horse in United States after 9,000 attempts (attempts are a ratio of eggs to births). If history gives us any gauge of the future, it is highly likely that our scientific efforts will become more robust, and cloning will no longer be a risk set of low percentile success rates. It is arguable that Darwin’s natural selection is applicable to the cloned community. Being that (per Darwin) humans spawn from natural selection and create clones by their own refined selection.

Consider this scenario: a relatively auspicious married couple in the early stages of their adult lives, with a wide range of ambitions, and no time to spare...They are committed to the well-being of their relationship and unknowingly start the stages of conceivable birth. They year is 2020 and modern biological technology has grown exponentially over the past decade. Clones are common in a variety of species including humans. The couple decides that they do want to raise and nurture a child in the far, rather than, near future. Their best option is to 1) take preparations to clone the unborn child in their present time 2) abort the child after taking a clonable tissue sample 3) clone the tissue sample at a later date. From a technical standpoint (per Darwin), this set of practices would eliminate the abortion argument – Or would it start something totally new?