c. 1998 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Unlike many religious leaders, the Rev. Ted Peters doesn’t believe cloning is”a threat to human identity”or that it”violates God’s sacred plan for baby-making.” Yet Peters, a Lutheran minister and a research associate with the Berkeley, Calif.-based Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, joins church groups and other religious experts on bioethics in the virtually unanimous chorus expressing dismay at Chicago-area physicist Richard Seed’s recent announcement that he plans to begin work on human cloning.

President Clinton has called on Congress to pass legislation he sent to Capitol Hill last summer that would ban human cloning. And less than one week after Seed’s announcement, 19 European nations announced an accord barring the cloning of humans in their nations.

Seed said he planned to use the same technology Scottish scientists used to create the cloned sheep Dolly in February 1997, and he said cloning would be a service to infertile couples otherwise incapable of having children.”There’s an enormous yuck factor in the religious reaction to cloning,”said Peters, author of”Playing God”(Routledge), because of statements Seed, a United Methodist, made on the religious implications of human cloning.

Seed, for example, has said”cloning … is the first serious step in becoming one with God.” The Rev. Ronald Cole-Turner of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and author of”Human Cloning: Religious Responses”(Westminster John Knox Press), agreed with Peters, saying such statements by Seed are”outrageous.””Almost without exception religious leaders say they have problems with cloning,”Cole-Turner said.”Some say `never’ to human cloning. Others, like myself, wouldn’t say `never,’ but are very apprehensive.” Cole-Turner, a United Church of Christ minister, said some religious groups”believe cloning would damage the image of God _ that human nature would become a technological product rather than an expression of love. They feel by taking genetic material from one original parent (instead of two as we do now), the cloned child would be too close to the original parent to be a unique individual.” Other groups, he said, are concerned about cloning as a justice issue.”They ask: Will cloning be good for children? If cloning were possible, would women feel pressured to undergo risky procedures?”Cole-Turner said.

Denominational statements issued after Seed’s announcement and the cloning of the sheep Dolly last winter, reflect similar concerns.

Last year, a Vatican statement,”Reflections on Cloning,”said,”Each human person should have the right to be born of the natural sexual union of a man and a woman. Cloning would be a denial of this process and this right.” Archbishop Spyridon, head of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, said after the production of Dolly,”Cloning … takes the final step in depersonalizing human beings. … Cloning would potentially make reproduction not a product of home and family, but of the laboratory. We are reminded of the dread scenarios of mass factory reproduction of human beings in Aldous Huxley’s book”Brave New World”and the … film”The Boys from Brazil,”in which clones of Hitler were made.” Seed says he is”a Christian and a Methodist.”Seed’s pastor, the Rev. Thomas Cross of the First United Methodist Church in Oak Park, Ill., has told reporters Seed is”committed to human well being”and”doing this (cloning) out of compassion.” But Methodist agencies in the United States and the United Kingdom denounced Seed’s proposals.

The Rev. Thom White Wolf Fasset, general secretary of the United Methodist Church’s Board of Church and Society, called on Congress to act on Clinton’s proposed human cloning ban.

In the United Kingdom, the Methodist Church said cloning should be prohibited and each nation should enforce this ban.

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In June, the United Church of Christ’s Committee on Genetics called for laws”to ban cloning for reproductive purposes, at least for the foreseeable future.”The committee, appointed by the denomination’s United Church Board for Homeland Ministries, said”the development of … technologies (such as cloning) to suit the desires of those who are … privileged … seems to fly in the face of fundamental claims of justice.”We say `enough’ to technologies that are privileges of the rich in the Western world,”the UCC statement said.

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Peters raised somewhat different concerns.”I worry that cloned children would be treated like commodities,”he said.”Many parents would engage in cloning to produce a `perfect’ child. These children, though, wouldn’t be perfect. How will they feel if they can’t live up to these expectations? God loves each of us regardless of our genes and we should do likewise. This may not happen with cloning.” Though worried about the”theological”repercussions of using cloning”to make babies,”Peters said”some benefit”may come from using human cloning in medical procedures such as organ transplants.

But he cautioned such research should proceed very carefully _ even with cloning that wouldn’t produce any children.

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