Cloning strips dignity from embryos by creating and killing them without naming them, or even properly calling them human beings. They're not Sarah or Stephen; they're steps on the way to SCNT-hES.
3. Remember that thou keep holy the Sabbath day.
Cloning's abuse of life goes around the clock. They don't empty the petri dishes Saturday and start again Monday.
4. Honor thy father and mother.
Cloning disrupts the unbroken chain of mother-father procreation that has perpetuated the race since Creation. Egg donors aren't honored as mothers; fatherhood is nullified.
5. Thou shalt not kill.
"Therapeutic" cloning creates embryos to kill them. Reproductive cloning can only be achieved if many embryos are sacrificed to perfect the process.
6. Thou shalt not commit adultery.
Cloning uses women to create children by means other than their husbands.
7. Thou shalt not steal.
"Therapeutic" cloning steals stem cells from embryos; all cloning steals a child's right to a natural father, conception, gestation and a unique place in the human family.
8. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
Cloning is predicated on the lie that a human embryo is not a human life.
9. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife.
Because of the many human eggs cloning demands, practitioners will covet women as donors.
10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, nor his field, nor his servant, nor his handmaid, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is his.
Therapeutic cloners covet an embryo's stem cells. And is it unreasonable to assume the drive to clone arises from an inordinate desire for money or power?
I'm neither a scientist nor a theologian, and perhaps my analysis of the Ten Commandments here is imperfect. But for cloning to be moral it must comply with all 10, and for it to merit legality -- even in a secular society -- it cannot violate any precept necessary to protect our neighbors from harm. Let's see its defenders explain how that could be.
Terence P. Jeffrey is the editor-in-chief of CNSNews
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