CHAPTER 2

Personhood and Human Clones

The Orphans of Project Leda

Orphan Black upends the most important, age-old myth about human cloning: that beings originated in this novel way would not be people, but zombies, sex slaves, robots, or property. From the very first scene of this binge-worthy series, when we watch con artist Sarah Manning witness the suicide of her clone-sister, detective Beth Childs, we understand that we are dealing with real humans with the complex fears, ambitions, and loves of humans anywhere on the planet.

Despite the fact that the Dyad Institute, the Neolutionists, and the Proletheans do think this way, do think of the orphans as “mere clones,” do think of them as property, as “theirs,” we viewers know better. Sarah is just as much a person as the smug, confident Dr. Leekie (unless, of course, we discover one day that, like Rachel Duncan, Leekie was also a clone? Wouldn’t that be a kick? A master clone scientist overseeing groups of cloned men and women?). Cosima is just as much a real, human graduate student as any other human grad student. Stepford-like housewife Alison is just as caught up in her children’s soccer games as any other suburban mother. Even Rachel, the kapo over the Leda sisters, is familiar to us as the repressed, cold, amoral, controlling, insanely ambitious businesswoman.

In short, although very different in personality and character, the orphans of Project Leda are all people originated by cloning, not just mindless clones. Similarly, the cloned men of Project Castor are not a mindless army, but also real, flawed people—if ones raised in unusual circumstances. And as people, the Ledas and Castors possess the same free will to make decisions, the same passion to enter into relationships, the same empathy to mourn the deaths of those they love, and even the same despair to commit suicide.

Why, then, in popular thinking, are clones thought of as something like zombies? Indeed, many people object to human cloning in part because they believe that any being produced this way would be subhuman and treated as such. Why do we assume that beings created without sex would somehow be different—and, more important, different in a bad way?

The influential essay about human cloning “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” by conservative bioethicist Leon Kass, emphasizes how human clones strike us: “‘Offensive.’ ‘Grotesque.’ ‘Revolting.’ ‘Repugnant.’ ‘Repulsive.’” These are the words most commonly heard regarding the prospect of human cloning. Such reactions come both from the man or woman in the street and from the intellectuals, from believers and atheists, from humanists and scientists. Even Dolly’s creator has said he “would find it offensive to clone a human being.”

Kass accepts, and even champions, the emotional responses of Luddites and religious conservatives whose guts tell them that human cloning is a boundary crossing, a deep violation of human nature, a line that only God and not humans should cross. What is inherently wrong for Kass about the creation of Dolly is what is inherently wrong about the creation of human clones: Dolly “is the work not of nature or nature’s God, but of man, an Englishman, Ian Wilmut, and his fellow scientists.” Cloned human beings, Kass says, would be the product “of man playing at being God.”

Kass and other conservative bioethicists also worry that beings created by cloning would be treated as commodities, denied—or unworthy of—the same rights and protections as “normal” beings. As Kass writes, “It is not at all clear to what extent a clone will truly be a moral agent.”

The frequency with which critics of cloning refer to it as “manufacture” also attests to the belief that clones would be less than human. The word choice invokes a powerful image from Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel, Brave New World: babies who emerge on an assembly line, mechanically and uniformly, unwanted, uncherished, un-nurtured, and unloved by normal parents, who hence grow up psychologically malformed.

However, these beliefs are the product of mindless prejudice, a groundless fear based on ignorance of how cloning works (a topic we’ll discuss further in later chapters). They also disregard an important principle of modern ethics: that how a human baby is created does not affect its status as a person, either legally or ethically. Put a little differently, it is a widely accepted principle of many ethical theories that people should be treated equally as persons unless there is a relevant reason to treat them differently.

Treating people differently requires special moral reasons. If a professor treats one student in class differently than another, then there must be a morally relevant reason for the differential treatment, such as that the student has a learning disability and so needs extra time taking a test. So just because someone’s biological parents were not married or are from different races is not a morally relevant reason to treat children differently who come from such unions. Similarly, just because children were created from assisted reproduction—which one could argue is no more unnatural than cloning—does not mean that, as children or adults, they are anything less than full persons.

If I meet someone who looks, talks, and acts like a person, if I meet Sarah Manning or Krystal Goderitch, then I should—all other things being equal—treat them as persons. And so we should treat the orphans. Call this the Principle of Non-Discrimination by Origins.

Historically, humans have been slow to learn this fundamental lesson of ethics. Indeed, primitive humans have used skin color, religious beliefs, geographical location, country of origin, marital status of parents, and sexual orientation as reasons to discriminate against others. But modern thinkers, too, have found it difficult to understand, especially when it comes to cloning humans.

According to Nigel Cameron, a famous, modern-day Christian bioethicist, “[Human cloning] would be perhaps the worst thing we have ever thought of in the maltreatment of our species. It would be a kind of new slave class. You would have human beings who were made by other human beings for their purposes.” But this is a bad, circular way of arguing. Because other people are prejudiced, it suggests, we must act as if the evil effects of that prejudice are justified. Just because people fear that cloned humans would be evil, unnatural, or weird does not mean that they should be treated differently—unless and until we have real evidence that they are different. And just as we cannot cite prejudice against gay people getting married or interracial marriage as a reason to oppose such marriages, so we cannot cite primitive fears about cloned people as justification for not allowing clones to be born.

A simple corollary of the Principle of Non-Discrimination by Origins holds that no one should suffer prejudice because of how she came into existence. Whether the Project Castor men were conceived in a Petri dish, by an older woman and a younger man, or as twins, triplets, or octuplets should not affect the moral status of each once he enters the world. How and why children arrive in the world does not affect their status as human beings, and they should be treated accordingly.

Legally speaking, as Professor Kerry Lynn Macintosh of the Santa Clara School of Law tells us in her book on human cloning, once a human fetus is viable and living outside the womb, it is a person. Killing a mother carrying a fetus is not a double homicide; killing mother and baby is. This is equally true of children created by various forms of assisted reproduction. No state has ever declared that a child created in a different way is anything less than legally entitled to all the benefits of any child created by sexual reproduction.

With this in mind, let us return to the idea, pervasive in our culture, of clones as commodities or slaves, abused because of their unique origins—and in particular, the idea that the bodies of cloned humans might be salvaged for organs to help their human genetic sources. It’s an idea we see repeatedly in literature and film, from the 1976 novel (and 1978 film) The Boys from Brazil to the 2005 movie The Island and Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel, Never Let Me Go.

In case it is not immediately obvious: IT’S WRONG TO MURDER PEOPLE. It’s wrong to take away the future life of any living person because you want something from that person, even if that person was created in a different way (a lesson that Tomas and Dr. Virginia “Mother” Coady clearly need to learn).

Why not? Let’s take an example. Why can’t the child created from Brad Pitt’s genes be used later by Brad to replace one of his failing kidneys? After all, without Brad, this child wouldn’t exist. Isn’t it better, as in the 2005 film The Island, to have decades of idyllic life and then be painlessly terminated for organ harvesting than to not exist at all?

Well, the answer is the same as why we can’t force an adult to give his or her identical twin with kidney failure one of his healthy kidneys. It would be very nice for the healthy twin to do so—in fact, the first live adult kidney donation, in 1954, was from one such twin to another. But the donation was a voluntary decision by the healthy twin, not a forced or assumed one.

Try this another way: Suppose physicians during early pregnancy could give a woman a twinning pill—one that causes her embryo to divide and become two identical embryos, mimicking what sometimes happens without intervention in the case of identical twins—and both embryos are then gestated to birth. Suppose a mother and her doctor conspire that it will be good one day for the first twin to have a “spare parts” twin—and how can the second twin object? Otherwise she would never have existed!

Simply because a person is created by asexual reproduction as spare parts for an ancestor does not mean that, in the words of the great philosopher Immanuel Kant, that person can be used as a “mere means” to sustain the life of his or her genetic source. You cannot and should not create a cloned twin of yourself to become an organ warehouse for your later use.

What happens to Katja Obinger and the Helsinki Ledas of Orphan Black is not a “disposal” or a “rendering” of a clone. No, instead, it is, quite plain and simply, murder. And if you don’t see this, well, you are still not thinking of beings created by asexual reproduction as real people.

In short, clones—whether those created for organ harvesting or scientific purposes like the orphans of Orphan Black, or those created by normal, childless couples wanting children with strong genetic connections—would not be mindless zombies, slaves, or commodities (or at least ethically they should not be). They would be people, with all the normal ethical and legal rights of real persons.