“Should we welcome, or even tolerate, the cloning of human beings?” That is the question with which Dr. Leon Kass, M.D., Ph.D. opens his speech at a conference focused on coalition-building hosted by Americans United for Life in 1998. Dr. Kass covers the science, morality, and human rights concerns underpinning the debate on the ethics of human reproductive cloning—the attempt to make copies of the human person.
As Dr. Kass puts it, “We have to decide nothing less than whether human procreation is going to remain human, whether children are going to be made rather than begotten, and whether we wish to say yes to the road that leads to the dehumanizing hell of brave new world.”
Dr. Kass served as the Chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005 and has been engaged for more than 40 years with ethical and philosophical issues raised by biomedical advances and, more recently, with broader moral and cultural issues. His most recent book, “What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song,” seeks to promote American identity, character and citizenship.
Dr. Kass’s evergreen remarks, delivered nearly a quarter century ago, remain fresh and relevant. Dr. Kass lays out how to avoid what he terms the “Frankenstein-ian hubris” of those who would promote reproductive human clones.
