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Cloning, Sex, and New Kinds of Families

by Glenn McGee

It goes without saying that human cloning does not involve, or need to involve, sexual intercourse. As one probes the seeming asexuality of cloning, one is initially drawn to the metaphors that feed and follow the asexual nature of the technology. Nuclear transfer of genetic information from a single human that results in the production, or at least is envisioned as having primacy in the creation, of another single human certainly seems to be the reproductive technology least tied to human intimacy. This is because it neither aims to approximate, nor synthesizes in scientific practice, the modes of procreation that have historically been tied to the experiences, feelings, and needs of sexual reproduction. Images and ideas about cloning have been produced largely by the literature of science fiction and ring not with the love or longing of couples engaged in a sexual search loaded with procreative resonance, but rather with the self-love of particular and usually egomaniacal individuals. The bad guys on Star Trek make clones, or are clones, or seek the power of cloning.

But is cloning free of sexual charge, or merely charged in ways that clinical and social institutions have not yet developed a vocabulary to explain? Is the resonance of cloning in the literature of science fiction free of sexual charge, or is it in fact nuanced with all sorts of feelings of need that fall quite neatly into the range of human sexual expression? How would it feel to make a clone, and what sort of concern ought those who work on sexuality have about experiments with radically new attempts to envision the emotional meaning of procreative, or in this case recreative, activity? Perhaps the most interesting and important questions about cloning and the ethics of its potential practice, queries that been examined to death in the philosophical literature and burgeoning literature of bioethics, have been targeted at the wrong loci. Instead of a strict focus on the needs of cloned offspring or the limits of human procreative freedom, perhaps what is called for is proactive, prescient reflection about the ways in which the human cloning debate gets at ideas of family and sexual life that merit attention in the scholarly community of sex research. Not myself a sex researcher, but rather a scholar of bioethics, I come to that task with the goal of provoking such a conversation by recasting the problem of cloning in categories that are new to the literature on the ethics of reproductive technology, and by offering a brief review of ways in which cloning has been understood in my related area of research.

The human cloning debate presents an unusually complex and emotionally charged set of problems, several of which seem to be both new and unusual. A history of that debate is instructive. Preceded by years of comparatively quiet veterinary genetic research on nuclear transfer, the context of the creation of the first cloned mammal was about as unusual as one could imagine. Public discussion of cloning was promulgated by Dolly, a cloned Blackfin Scottish Ewe named for a country music singer, and inflamed by Richard Seed, a Chicago biophysicist (involved with embryo transfer experiments) who announced on National Public Radio that he planned to clone himself several times "for fun."(1) Public debate about cloning, catalyzed by Seed, centered around the danger of a despot conducting cloning experiments that would in some way pose a hazard to the population at large, and on the dangers of homogeneity that might obtain from cloning pets and livestock. Virtually every philosopher with an interest in ethics was suddenly called on by television to answer questions, most frequently: "Is it ethical to clone a recently deceased child?" or, "Would a clone have a soul?" A LEXIS/NEXIS search of newspaper and major television and magazine stories in 1997 containing both the words clone and philosopher revealed more than 4,500 individual citations, 65% of which occur in March of that year. Within a year of the birth of Dolly the odd, marginal, and unlikely problem of human cloning had been elevated to one of the most hotly debated issues in 20th century science and health. Oddly missing from the debate were sexologists, scholars of the history of sexuality, or researchers in deviance and in family demography. The question "Will cloning take men out of the picture or eliminate sex?" was posed to bioethicists who lacked understanding of the set of problems, and was hardly taken up at all by the subsequent commissions and deliberative projects on cloning in the United States and Europe.

Philosophical debate about cloning has been mounted but along fairly predictable lines, with scant examination of the implications of cloning for human nature, social institutions, or the practice of basic biological science. The received ethical question remains narrow, focused on the limitations of personal procreative liberty (i.e., does anyone have the right to make a clone, and upon whose rights would such a process infringe: McGee, 1998a; Roy, 1998). Two recent announcements have made this question seem urgent: the news that a clinic in Korea may have made a human embryo from cloned adult DNA, and reports of the need for creating human embryos from cloning in order to advance stem cell technology, including the fairly revolutionary project of Advanced Cell Technologies, who inserted human DNA into a cow egg to form human-like cloned embryos for stem cell research. (McGee, 1998b) However, the insistence of many thinkers that cloning be treated as a special instance of limitation on procreative rights has impoverished the broader debate about how sexuality and reproduction are changing at the turn of the century.

Genetic science of the 20th century impacts the way humans understand human capacity, meaning, and potential. Genetics is intimately tied to procreation, sexuality, and reproduction, which are also the foci of the most intimate and invasive institutions, the family, medicine, and religion. When humans make children and when it is time to think of inheritance, one is building one's personal and communal understandings of loyalty, privacy, happiness, and growth. And, at the same time, human genetic information is rapidly becoming both a language of medical diagnosis and a commodity for licensure and ownership. Someone owns techniques for cloning mammals, including humans. It has become important to make social choices about the institutions that should be entrusted to reconstruct the family in an era of advancing reproduction, genetics, and cloning.

What is required is a focus on the biological, cultural, and common sense dimensions of human cloning. By selectively emphasizing and analyzing these three dimensions of the context of cloning, rather than rushing to more obviously normative aspects, one sees that human cloning is neither a special moral issue nor a radical step forward. Instead, human cloning is seen to be an element in a set of moral and scientific problems that compel scholars to reconstruct the enterprise of social thought about the embryo, the family and future generations (McGee, 1998c; McGee & McGee D, 1998: for further discussion see McGee & Wilmut, 1998).

BIOLOGICAL DIMENSIONS OF HUMAN CLONING

While there is an accepted biological definition of cellular cloning, and there are now well-understood (indeed, patented) practices for the transfer of nuclei from embryos or somatic cells into enucleated eggs, it is still not possible to define a cloned mammal organism. That this is so has not gone unnoticed in the biological and philosophical literature of the latter part of this century.(2) Yet now that mammalian cloned organisms are among us, and human clones seem imminent, it becomes critical to ask anew how institutions and individuals are to obtain semantic and scientific clarity about the meaning of a mammalian clone? Must a clone have all of its DNA from a single other creature? Must the donor of a clone's DNA be an adult? Can a clone's egg come from a source other than the DNA source? If the source DNA contains a slight mutation, is the resultant organism still a clone? Must a clone act or sound or seem like its source organism, or perform that organism's role in the community or herd? These questions have not yet been answered, despite the use of clone as a descriptor for, at last count, more than 400 living mice, sheep, cows, and other mammals.

Received definitions of a human clone come from science fiction, not the lab. Stories of cloning have been used to illustrate the problems of nature versus nurture, the problem of defining the content of human character, and the problem of preserving our memories in future generations. Captain Kirk's transporter failed, splitting him into two Kirks, one aggressive and domineering, the other intellectual but indecisive. Fictional clones underwent "replicative fading" in Brave New World as they were copied one from another. Mostly, clones of our imagination have carried the memories, feelings, and ambitions of one generation into a next generation. Clones have been dupes and dopes, only occasionally rising above Dr. Frankenstein's monster's guttural longings. When it was announced that Dolly had been constructed with DNA taken from the udder of its progenitor, American fear of cloning was motivated and circumscribed by the clones of a hundred years of imagination. President Clinton penned a letter within hours of the announcement calling his previously unfunded Presidential Bioethics Panel into action to prevent abominations of the family, with exactly these fears in mind.

How one defines a clone seems to depend on to which side of the issue one stands. Those who see no problem with human cloning, such as Princeton geneticist Silver (1998) and Alabama philosopher Pence (1997), matter-of-factly compare any cloned human embryo to a monozygotic twin, which contains the same genetic information as its womb-mate sibling. Twins, it is noted, happen frequently in human life, and it is common today to keep one sibling embryo frozen in nitrogen long after the birth of a first. To avoid the pejorative overtone about clones and cloning, Pence suggests a new term: somatic cell nuclear transfer. By contrast, those who disapprove of human cloning technology point to the centrality of sexual recombination in mammal reproduction, and argue that it would be extremely difficult to predict either the viability or risks associated with gestating or being born a human clone (Caplan, 1997; Kass 1997).

Can there be a sober, agreeable definition of a clone? While the brute techniques required to produce a clone are getting better, embryologists cannot state with absolute certainty the genetic or phenotypic identity of a clone It is impossible even to establish the genetic similarity of Dolly to its progenitor beyond checking a few patches of genetic code in a few cells. Dolly's status as a clone was confirmed in 1998 by analysis of restriction fragment length polymorphisms in Dolly and its dead progenitor ewe. However, the full sheep genome has not yet been sequenced and it is not yet possible to compare the complete genetic information in any two sheep cells. Moreover, Dolly is markedly morphologically different from its progenitor ewe, some 20% larger by Wilmut's own calculations. All this goes to the point that while it is possible to draw inference from our method and the morphological outcome of cloning, it is not possible to confirm what a clone "is" using scientific measurement. This is ironic given how easy it is to make a clone, and emblematic of the degree to which our ability to engineer outstrips our ability to measure the outcome.

We think of the identity of mammals, including human beings, more and more in terms of the genetic code they bring into the world. A variety of new, urgent, and puzzling legal cases force adults to puzzle over the meaning of that code as it bears on parenthood and identity. When two mothers each give part of an egg, are both mothers? If surrogate mothers do not donate DNA, are they mothers? If a couple divorces, what role does each divorcee have in determining the use of frozen embryos they have previously made? If a man dies, can he be a posthumous father? These and more difficult cases have led jurists and legislators to create exceptional new laws about genetic relatedness (McGee, 1998c). Biologists and the broader culture would thus like to be able to at least define cloning in terms of something stable: genetic similarity. Cloning, after all, seems to raise the possibility of a wholly new kind of child, one made not from sex or sexual recombination, but rather from the transfer of genetic information from a single progenitor into its offspring. But in reality, while one cannot know what sort of a human being a clone would be, neither is it possible to have any objective purchase on the variety of new kinds of children we make through new reproductive technologies and through new social mechanisms. Scientists may be able to determine the origins of a child's DNA, but that only begins the process of reinventing ideas of relatedness and how relatedness conveys status and responsibility. Clinical programs in reproductive technology have amazing new ways to make children, and society thinks of the reproductive technology process in increasingly design-oriented terms (Katz & Rothman, 1997; Kitcher, 1997; McGee, 1997).

That this is so is a function of the biological, political, and economic history of pregnancy and childbearing, which others have discussed in much more detail than I will attempt here (Katz & Rothman, 1997; Kitcher, 1997; Steinbock, 1994). Elsewhere I have drawn the conclusion that new genetic technologies and neonatal intensive care, as well as advancing diagnostic science, have changed the nature of the pregnancy experience from one of having to one of making babies (McGee, 1997). By this I mean that our best ethnographic studies suggest that parents of our time are able to identify with and care for a future child, and that their relationship to future children, including fetuses as well as those not yet conceived, is one that frequently feels like it includes an obligation to prevent future harm. Even sexuality is infused with this sense, as recent reports about fears of sex during pregnancy suggest (Katz & Rothman, 1997).

Despite a cultural insistence on the absolute right of a woman to terminate a pregnancy prior to the time a fetus is viable outside the womb, parents and social institutions are increasingly able to think of the fetus as a child for a variety of purposes. Thus, for example, parents who fail to care for their pregnancy, or physicians who fail to diagnose a fetal malady, are subject to sanctions or damages for the tort of harming a being that does not (at the time of pregnancy) have a right to exist per se, but seems to nonetheless have a right not to be brought into the world in a way that is harmful to it (Parfit, 1986).

The identification of a parental responsibility to future offspring has been long in coming and is tied to a variety of changes in what individuals mean by childhood and what they expect of children and childbearing. In the course of creating the most recent birth and genetic technologies clinicians and parents have found a way "under the hood" of pregnancy, radically increasing the ability of adults to take care in choosing the time and manner of pregnancy. Parents use ultrasound, conduct amniocentesis, mix and match genetic parents, and screen for the most healthy embryos, all for this purpose.

For example, if a woman's eggs are in some way defective and if the couple can take a second mortgage or have a free credit card, they will be treated for infertility. Why? Because it is now said that wholly apart from the couple's need to make love to one another,(3) they feel the separate need to have a biologically similar child; the need to do something to make such a child. The new tool of egg donation implies the possibility that they might ameliorate a new kind of need. They want a child; they want it to feel like their child, they want to give birth to it. The need to have a child of such specific parameters is a new kind of phenomenon, inspired by the culture's increasing tendency to think of fertility and parenthood as a state of affairs that includes both gestation and genetic relation (McGee & McGee, 1998). The couple's imagination is of a child that is "mostly" theirs. But a baby from egg donation, they are told, is not 100% their genetic child. They are not going to be able to completely emulate the "fertile" state. So, electing to use a donated egg, they are under the hood, tinkering with what for most parents is just a shiny surprise. Their child is going to require more planning. No more will sexual encounters be about making babies. Their baby will come from a dish. They control, or at least hope to control, what goes in the dish. Put more accurately, parents feel responsible for what goes in the dish. They won't want to choose a donor who has a dangerous congenital anomaly. If they can choose a donor who is more likely to produce offspring with traits resembling our own (height, eye color), they might spare their child the feeling of being obviously different from them. And if they are under the hood anyway, they might also make sure that one of their children is male, and pay a small amount more for a young, Ivy League donor.

That it is odd to be under the hood is obvious. That it is a different kind of parental decision-making, less subtle and more commodified, seems likely. But the point to be noted here is that advancing reproductive technologies exacerbate the evolving problem of assigning and enacting parental responsibility. Where the abortion debate focused the attention of the western world on the comparatively simple question of when an in vivo fetus takes on moral status, new reproductive technologies raise the problem of what it means to be a parent, and what value that experience has for those involved. In the case above, they will try to compensate for the 50% loss of parental DNA by making wise choices about the donor, choices that will both make them feel responsible and further assert a claim to dominion over the resultant child.

In the case of a cloned embryo, it is not at all obvious who are the parents. The person who donates DNA from a somatic cell is the progenitor, in that the child carries that person's DNA. But the mammalian parents of the cloned child are the grandparents, if what one means by parent is that the person contributed 50% of the genes to the recombination process that formed the genome of the person in question, rather than some idea about who most recently "used" the genes prior to their infusion into a new child. If the egg used to raise the clone comes from another person, as it would in the case of a clone of a male, there is in addition an egg parent, a person who contributes mitochondrial DNA and RNA in the egg wall, the collective role of which on an organism is unknown but perhaps significant. If the progenitor of the clone is itself an embryo or aborted fetus, the parent would not only be a virgin, but also a nonconsenting nonperson that itself has no legally established standing apart from the wishes of its own progenitor. Cloning makes acute what is already true in many new technologies and for embryology more generally in our time: Scientists and parents literally do not know what is in the petri dish, and make stipulative claims about our relationship to the thing in the dish based on a poorly thought-out set of ideas about intimacy and family.

The empirically researched ties between institutions of family and practices of sex have often been misunderstood and misstated by the community whose primary focus has been ethics in medicine. In part this stems from what philosopher John Dewey called selected emphasis, namely the narrow focus on the rights and responsibilities of would-be parents engaged in activities that can result in the birth of a child. By ignoring the importance of sex as a form and part of human flourishing, philosophers needless miss the context of sex and its importance for the ethics of cloning. In effect the debate proceeds along the puritanical lines of the ethics of parenthood and society, leaving sexual procreation as just another detachable experience to be conquered by technology.

Further, the complex and engineered nature of the cloning procedure makes each part of cloning difficult and interesting for those who would rely on any particular aspect of human biology for their ethical context. It is not obvious that a cloned embryo is an embryo. One part of what makes a mammalian embryo, after all, is conception.(4) Sperm and egg fuse, and an embryo is formed. This is not so for a clone. An egg whose nucleus has been removed is fused with DNA from, for example, a human skin cell. The result is that the egg, in some cases, begins to behave much as an embryo. In the best of cases, that of the cloned mice from Hawaii, successful pregnancies of such embryo-like things result in only about 4% of all attempts. This is, or one might believe it to be, much less frequent than pregnancy rates for mice (or humans) attempting to have offspring through sex, though about the same as the rate of pregnancy from human sexual intercourse more generally. Put another way, a cloned mammalian embryo appears to be less viable than a noncloned embryo. What does it take to call the creature an embryo? Must there be fusion of egg and sperm? Must there be clinical potential, and if so, how much potential, that such a creature could flourish during gestation? Further, what is the bar for such a creature to count as a restoration of fertility, or as a therapy for infertility?

This last question is the most vexing part of the biological dimension of cloning. The felt need to parent is undeniable in society, and more than $2 billion is spent annually on the pursuit of biological parenthood through infertility medications and procedures. At one level, social institutions need to form claims about what sort of role individuals should be able to play in designing children: how far under the hood they should be allowed to go. There surely are some negative rights against governmental interference in procreative activity (Robertson, 1994), and these perhaps include some right to experiment with technologies like cloning (Robertson, 1998). But more problematic is what it means to provide care for those who have a need to parent. Elsewhere I have noted that it is a common mistake to assume that it is species-typical for human beings to have children that carry our own genes or are biologically similar to us (McGee & McGee, 1998).(5) Thus, while it is fairly easy to establish that infertility includes an inability to contribute gametes or gestation to a child's birth, sequellae to some organic dysfunction, the rub is that one cannot always cure the organic dysfunction itself. The therapy for infertility is often a technology aimed at providing as many children as are desired by some parent or parents. But is infertility cured by providing this therapy? Would adoption cure the condition of infertility as well? Does cloning present a cure? It seems clear that the answer requires theorists of fertility and sex to rethink and reconstruct the way that the needs of biology as regards reproduction manifest themselves in individual and cultural habits.

CULTURE AND CLONING

I was raised in the 1970s with a story about what it meant to be a child. The idea was that parents loved each other, got married, made love, and babies resulted. Parents loved each other so much that they raised those children as their own, and made sure that they could handle the responsibilities of parenting, marriage, and career by organizing life in such a way that only one of the parents would work, while the other raised the children. It is the story of the birds and the bees. Birds and bees, of course, do not live that way. But the story has powerful resonance for many Americans, representing what has taken on the name "traditional family values" in political discourse, despite the fact that such families are increasingly rare. It is a story that links sex, reproduction, and family in strict terms. While technologies for making children have changed quite a bit, most aim at and are measured against the story of the birds and the bees (McGee & Wilmut, 1998). In divorce and adoption, for example, the model of the birds and the bees is used by jurists to measure degrees of variation from the norm, and to aim at giving every child some approximation of the norm (McGee & Wilmut, 1998).

The data are fairly clear that tomorrow's children will not be raised in the world of birds and bees. Perhaps the most apt zoological metaphor for parenthood in this time is that of the ants and the termites, who live in large groups with distributed parental roles. The 21st century American culture sees children most often raised by some combination of nongenetic parents, or by those who are not parents at all. More than 40% of those born after 1998, we now believe, will have more than one mother or father by age 18. The majority of American children are effectively raised in day care, while all three or four of their parents pursue careers. Many in society have held that a critical role one can play in the life of a child is that of godparent, coach, or foster parent, and many families in many ethnicities have well-articulated roles for these mentors. It is not accidental that for centuries many of these roles have been identified as parental in nature, despite the lack of genetic or biological connection of the adult to the child. Such is the case for ants and termites, who distribute the parental role seamlessly across many kinds of caretakers, most of whom have no literal gestational or fertilization link to the young. The model of the ants and the termites seems quite contrary to the sociobiological model of modern human reproduction proffered most prominently by Dawkins' Selfish Gene model in which all beings--and each being within the kind--seek to be parents by trying desperately to give genes to someone through sexual reproduction.

New technologies necessitate new stories. Octuplets and septuplets will be the first in the human species to hear a story of the dogs and the cats; about being part of a litter. Humans need a story for a child whose entire first grade class, and soccer team, is comprised of siblings. Children of postmenopausal pregnancy will need a new story more fitting than that of the "accidental" late-born child of yesterday. Children of sperm and egg donors will need a story. While today most parents do not tell their children of the presence of donor DNA, eventually it will not be optional. Perhaps these children will be told a story about the racehorse bred from chosen samples of sperm, identified as a way of giving a child something in lieu of one's own gametes. Lions represent a story for children who are gestated by one woman, with an egg from another and DNA from a third. As transgenic egg donation from monkeys or cows finds its way into human reproduction, stories for that technology too will be needed.

But what story can one tell a clone? Already I have noted that human cloning is unprecedented in the natural history of mammals. Twins are the closest existing phenomenon, and unlike the clone they are born together and have sibling relationships. The stories of parental roles in cloning in the media are frightening in almost all cases. One has parents replicating a child who has died early due to an accident. Another has an infertile woman seeking a genetic link to her recently deceased husband through a clone from a tissue sample she happens to have lying around. Still a third has the parent raising a clone of his wife to realize his dream of seeing his wife as a child. It is difficult to imagine how a family would form stories for such a mode of intimacy, birth, and connectedness.

The point of discussing children's stories is two fold. First, it is clear that whatever progress science makes in infertility, an important part of realizing the potential of such technology to satisfy the felt needs of adults is an account of what the technology will mean for the child. More, such family relationships are heavily textured by their social and institutional histories. Being tolerant of new kinds of families will have to begin with existing technologies and move out slowly and experimentally toward the margins.

But family is not the only sexual experience, and cloning would seem to have a significant impact on how sexual experience could be understood in relation to procreative activity. Following the host of other stories about how sex relates to family, cloning stories push the envelop in terms of marginalizing the importance of intimacies of various kinds in the personal sexual lives of those who want children and of those who do not. It could not be more clear that research must be conducted on the relative status of sexual intimacy in the minds of persons engaged in different kinds of procreative activity.

Second, children's stories--and the lack thereof---evidence the cultural manifestations of methods of satisfying parents' demands for children. The predominance of the story of the birds and the bees is symptomatic of a cultural and institutional commitment to genetic determinism, which in this case means a social faith that what matters about blood relation, and about relatedness itself, is programmed in and received through the genes of parents. People get married, make babies, and raise them in ways that seem normal because of their history, the habits passed down through the last three or four generations of western families. It is only recently that one could consider the possibility of lesbian or gay reproduction, or ponder the relative value of different kinds of offspring or relatedness. So efforts to squeeze every case into a standard of deviation from the normal model of birds and bees is merely a kind of collective dissonance with forming new habits about such an intimate matter. Families struggle with new technologies to restore the apparent equilibrium of the "classical" family, and work to find technologies that have as much explanatory power as the birds and the bees. This is one reason why, for example, most couples will use sperm injection rather than donor sperm. It is simply assumed that it is better and more normal to have a child that shares more identity with the parents. Thinking about and emphasizing the role of children's stories helps to bring these two issues into focus.

Habits in making families are only part of the culture of reproduction. Parenthood is, at its edges, controlled and defined by the community and its institutions, and it is more than idle Platonic fantasy that children are in some sense raised by the state. I noted that economics, politics, and theology play roles in how infertility is understood and treated. The family is also only one among many institutions that raise children. In fact, when parents fail in a variety of tasks (from immunization to feeding to education), they can lose their parental rights, to be restored only at the discretion of representatives of democracy. The upstream manifestation of this public concern for the welfare of children is manifest when, for example, it is argued that future children ought not be exposed to the danger of cloning, or that research to clone humans is of a comparatively low priority in the existing array of choices for research spending. Even editors of scientific journals and newspapers have a choice about what they will send out for review and in what way they will publish findings about cloning. The culture has numerous options as its institutions are reconstructed by the rush to create and manage new technologies for parents and children. One is not limited by the concepts of family values or parenthood from the last 30 years, but neither can one invent ideas of familial rights without situating them in their cultural context.

COMMON SENSE AND CLONING

Cloning does not pose a unique challenge, but it has called attention to the vast array of new technologies that make new kinds of families whose parameters and relationships are neither pregiven nor socially sanctioned. It is insufficient to ask, as do most critics of cloning, whether a child of cloning would be deprived of a right to individuality (McGee & Wilmut, 1998). I have demonstrated that no child has an open future, and even our cursory examination of the changing history of parenthood makes clear that it is not individuality but rather responsible relationships and growth that are the goal of new procreative activity (see Davis, 1997).

I have not addressed, in this essay, the tough or exceptional cases. Richard Seed wants to make clones. Greg Pence suggests the viability of cloning dead scientists. A Korean clinic may soon make the "first" clone. The tough cases are interesting, and many commentators focus exclusively and exhaustively on whether Seed should be stopped or Korea sanctioned. But the broader question is more important: What institutions and arenas are right for situating the debate about human cloning and its ken? Elsewhere Wilmut and I argue that the adoption procedure is a metaphor for what is possible: regional, localized evaluation of candidates for new procedures, accompanied by education and the social embrace of new families (McGee & Wilmut, 1998)). But other and more experimental methods too may be called for. The claim of this essay is that the need to reconstruct the entire enterprise of making children in the 21st century is a necessary backdrop for debate about human cloning. Once this is accomplished, we can move beyond exceptional approaches to general problems and develop new institutional and personal habits for making and supporting families in the 21st century. More important, only then will it be possible to develop a systematic research agenda that brings the study of sex into the bioethical debate about what it means to be human in a time when reproduction and procreation requires so little ordinary physical intimacy.

(1) His first son, Richard Seed Jr., he said, had been "lost to him" in a divorce, Seed commented in a public debate (against the author) at Northwestern University in 1998. Cloning would make it possible to make more of Richard, and his post-menopausal wife would play Sara to his Abraham in order to make these children.

(2) How one defines a cellular clone is a matter of simple scientific necessity. One must understand the meaning of moving DNA from cell to cell, or species to species, in order to control analysis of conditions and outcomes in the millions of experiments that are conducted in that vein every year.

(3) This too is a need we might now use technologies to fulfill, independent of our desire to reproduce.

(4) True, a monozygotic twin breaks away from the original conceptus. But the time between the formation of a zygote and the culling away of a twin is so slight as to imply the strong role of fertilization in the twin's origin as well.

(5) Tonnies (1961) noted that the desire to have sameness in our children is a function of political assumptions about what children are for, rather than some sort of normal human phenomenon. Sociobiologists ignore both the myriad similar species whose members do not all have genetic children, and the extensive evidence that the human choice to reproduce is as much informed by cultural and political drift as anything else.

REFERENCES

Caplan, A. (1997). Am I my brother's keeper. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press.

Davis, D. (1997 March). A child's right to an open future. Hastings Center Report, 27 (2), 7-15.

Kass, L. (1997, June 2). The wisdom of repugnance. New Republic, 216 (22), 17-26.

Kitcher, P. (1997). The lives to come. New York: Free Press.

McGee, G (1997). The perfect baby: A pragmatic approach to genetics. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.

McGee, G. (1998a). Human cloning: An introduction. In G. McGee (Ed.), The human cloning debate. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Hills Books.

McGee, G. (1998b). A Cow's Egg. In G. McGee & A. Kaplan (Eds.), Breaking bioethics, MSNBC Online. Retrieved September 8, 1999 from the World Wide Web: http://www.med.upenn.edu/bioethics/breaking/13Nov98.html.

McGee, G. (1998c). Genetic exceptionalism. Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, 11, 565-570.

McGee, G., & McGee, D. (1998, March). Nuclear meltdown: Ethics of the need to transfer genes. Politics and the Life Sciences p. 16-19.

McGee, G., & Wilmut, I. (1998). Cloning and the Adoption Model. In G. McGee (Ed.), The human cloning debate, (p. 133-145). Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Hill Books.

Parfit, D. (1986). Reasons and persons. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Pence, G. (1997). Who's afraid of human cloning. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

Robertson, J. (1994). Children of choice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Robertson, J. (1998). Liberty, identity, and human cloning. Texas Journal of Law, 76, 1371-1456.

Roy, I. (1998). Philosophical implications of human cloning. In G. McGee (Ed.) The human cloning debate (pp. 41-66). Berkeley: Berkeley Hill Books.

Silver, L. (1998). Remaking Eden: Cloning and beyond in a brave new world of genetic engineering. New York: Avon Books.

Tonnies, F. (1961). Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. In T. Parsons (Ed.), Theories of Society (pp. 191-201). New York: The Free Press.

Manuscript accepted July 12, 2000

Glen McGee University of Pennsylvania

The author acknowledges David Magnus, Arthur Caplan, Rosemarie Tong, Pilar Ossario, Andrea Gurmankin, Deborah Putnam Thomas, and an Atlantic Fellowship in Public Policy from the UK Government, and a grant from the Greenwall Foundation to support study of the relationship between empirical and normative approaches to research in medicine.

Address correspondence to Dr. Glenn McGee, Center for Bioethics, 3401 Market Street, Suite 320, Philadelphia, PA 19104; email: mcgee@mail.med.upenn.edu.

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