Ben Shapiro Shapiro is a second-year
political science student. E-mail him at frumfiddle@aol.com.
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George W. Bush is back in a big way. With his call for a
complete ban on human cloning, even for research purposes, Bush
sounded the political shot heard around the country. He
simultaneously revived his reputation as a moral thinker unburdened
by political jousting, slapped the pro-abortion lobby in the face,
and forced the Democrats in Congress to open debate on his
agenda.
Over the last few months, Bush seemed to be experiencing the
kind of political drift toward the left that sank his father in the
1992 election. He signed the liberal campaign finance reform bill,
stopped his immediate pursuit of drilling in the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge, and left behind his goal of school vouchers. The
Senate rejected his federal judiciary appointee, Judge Pickering.
He caved to foreign and domestic pressure to push Israel toward an
unjust and impossible cease-fire with terrorists. His own
constituency was leery of his somewhat muddled political
stance.
All that changed on April 10, when President Bush offered this
appraisal of human cloning: “As we seek to improve human
life, we must always preserve human dignity. And therefore, we must
prevent human cloning by stopping it before it starts.” On
the face of it, President Bush’s stand does not seem like
such a big deal. But by calling for a complete ban on human
cloning, Bush made a statement that human life is sacred; that the
value of a soul must never be underestimated; that as a country, we
must have faith in God that non-cloning scientific developments
will cope with contemporary scientific problems.
The debate over human cloning is generally parsed into two
areas: reproductive cloning and research cloning. Human cloning in
both areas is achieved by transferring genetic material from a
donor into a woman’s egg with the nucleus removed. The human
created, then, is a genetically identical copy of the donor. The
end goal of reproductive cloning is the birth of a child, while the
end goal of research cloning is the destruction of the fetus for
research purposes.
Reproductive cloning is generally opposed, but research cloning
is a more subtle issue. If combined with DNA-alteration techniques
of genetic engineering, reproductive cloning clearly leads in the
direction of the designing of an “Ubermensch” of the
type Hitler admired. As Bush put it, “Our children are gifts
to be loved and protected, not products to be designed and
manufactured.” Even limited to a scenario of parental use,
the arrogance a person would have to possess to design a human
being exactly in their image is beyond belief.
Research cloning, for its part, devalues human life. It creates
a human embryo only to destroy it for research purposes. It is not
morally justifiable to destroy a human embryo to correct someone
else’s disability.
Bush takes a politically dangerous position by banning all
cloning, but he is morally correct nonetheless.
It is Bush’s stand on research cloning that sends a
message to the pro-abortion crowd ““ human life, no matter in
what form is not to be tampered with.
This position also requires firm faith in God. People will
surely die because of a lack of data that could have been gained
from research cloning. Bush told us as a nation that God will find
an alternative, morally defensible path to successful research
methodology. The U.S. is a nation founded on religious principles,
no matter what the political left would have us believe. As such,
we must find the most morally correct alternative in any given
situation.
The Democrats do not have the option of stalling on this issue,
as Tom Daschle has done for months on end. President Bush has
brought this issue to the forefront of public discussion. If the
Democrats turn down Bush’s request for a total ban on human
cloning, they will face the political and moral consequences.
For President Bush, this clear stand is a welcome return to his
moral vision for America, forged during his campaign and solidified
by his response to September 11. We can only hope that this renewed
moral clarity is an omen of great things to come.