Thanks to David for posting the first question. He referenced this article and asked what it means on a global scale. This makes for a nice opportunity to introduce the topic of bioethics and the sanctity of life as it relates to us as followers of Christ. We are living in times of big changes and lots of issues hanging in the balance as it relates to the way we value human life—whether it be abortion, euthanasia, or human cloning. There are lots of aspects of these issues that I’d like cover, but we’ll start with some of the issues that came up in the article.

First of all, as I see it, there is nothing wrong with cloning in and of itself. It is essentially no different than in vitro fertilization, except that it creates an identical twin across generations. So in theory, it looks fine, but that is about as far as it goes. To perfect the process, scientists would go through countess failed trials where the resulting embryo will not survive. To me, this is too high of a price to pay for this technology.

Getting to the content of the article, the perversity of the conventional thinking on cloning is exposed in this quote: “While there is near universal support among the United Nations’ 191 members to ban reproductive cloning — the cloning of babies — countries have wrestled over whether to allow cloning for stem cell and other research.” Think about that… It is OK to create a cloned human being as long as it is destroyed for its body parts. There is so much more to say, but I’ll save it for another day.