Sibling RivalryIs your clone your daughter—or your sister?

Notes From The Fray Editor:

This has been a sparkling Fray. Responding to critics who think that he undervalues the parent's importance to an adopted child or overvalues the importance of genetics to parentood, Jim Lewis has begun two threads (here and here) and has made several responses within them. These dialogues are well worth reading.

Mr. Lewis wants us to start calling genetic offspring "sister" or "brother" to better recognize the genetic relationship between parent and child. In that case, I guess parents should begin calling their adopted children "friends" or perhaps "house guests."

The parent/child relationship goes much, much deeper than mere genetics, and is defined much, much more by the behavior and emotions of the two people involved than by their genes.

There is much to worry about with regards to human cloning, but trying to "dry up the revenue stream" by recasting social taboos into strict DNA terms is hardly raising the debate, and isn't even a very good scare tactic.

Jim Lewis is frighteningly astute when he notes that a cloned girl is in no way the offspring of the woman who carries her -- and that it is "gruesome" to pretend otherwise by calling that clone a "daughter."

Indeed, the only thing more gruesome is when we wantonly apply that biologically sacrosanct label to equally unrelated "offspring": adopted girls.

Both the press and the public casually call these completely foreign and biologically unrelated humans the daughters of their so-called parents just because those people provide the girls with love, a home, and a family. And, what's more, we do this without a shudder! How far we have fallen.

As Lewis suggests, we need a new name to reflect the fact that these children are biologically "nothing" to their "mothers." We need a name to shock our sensibilities and call us back to our natures. A name to highlight the insincerity of this false familial bond. I propose "naughters."

Now what to do about boys...? Well, they never cared much for their moms anyway.

All of these attempts to make cloning into some hideous ethical quagmire are transparently self-serving. The unsettling thing about cloning isn't the relationship between the clone and its parent/sibling. Many people are raised by siblings with no ill effect; in fact, my grandmother was the only "mother" her siblings ever really knew. It's not the potential for sexual relationship between the non-cloned "parent" and the clone; such a relationship is queasy for reasons that have nothing to do with cloning (Woody and daughter, anyone?) It's not even the "Thou Shalt Not Go Stealing My Life-Creating Schtick" issue that the churches raise. They were up in arms about artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization and other techniques, granted, but no "Life-Creating" technology has incensed the religionists like cloning has.

All of these objections to cloning are red herrings, dangled before us to keep us objecting to cloning without stopping to consider the REAL reason widespread cloning must NEVER, EVER occur.

Cloning renders males superfluous. The end.

"Suppose, again, that Ms. Doe decided upon a second cloned pregnancy, this time using Mr. Doe's DNA. The son she bore (for symmetry's sake we'll call him Adam), would have no genetic relationship to his putative sister, Eve, at all..."

WRONG. Actually, the two kids would share mitochondrial DNA (not nuclear DNA - assuming, of course, the same mom's ova were used for each) and hence would be closer genetically than, say, adopted siblings of different bioparents.

There's no language in which kinship terminology maps perfectly onto contemporary notions of biological relatedness. Many languages have separate kin terms for relatives whose biological relationship to the speaker is equivalent (such as separate terms for mother's brother and father's brother, or for parallel cousins and cross cousins). Others lump together relatives whose biological relationship is very different: for example, in English, we use the same kin term, "aunt," for "parent's sister" and for "parent's brother's wife": one is a biological relative and the other is related by marriage. (Same with "uncle," "nephew," and "niece," of course.)

Look, *you* may not think genetics has any interesting relationship to parenthood, and *I* may not think it does, but the sort of people who would opt for cloning, were such a thing possible, presumably do -- otherwise they'd just adopt. I mean, my guess is some of them would be women who want the experience of being pregnant, but many of them would be people who believe that passing on their genes is important. That's pretty much the whole point of cloning, no? And, again, all I'm trying to say is that it's a rather complicated bit of business, which has been badly represented.

So...*you* think -- or rather, you "may think" -- that genetics has no interesting relationship to parenting and parental status. Thanks for clearing that up. Now how did my fellow readers and I get so badly misled as to your intentions and feelings on this matter?

Let's go back to the article and examine how you refer to the relation between this putative mother-daughter pair (and our understanding of that relation): "a colossal mistake," "creepy," "that just makes things worse," "horrifying," "the taboos quickly multiply," "[d]iscomfiting," "hair-raising," "it's gruesome enough on paper," "no one would want to play it in real life," "'poor deluded victim of a benighted scientific culture.'"

I guess that misunderstandings sometimes occur. But take heart. It means that your article was right on at least one thing: Our words do matter.

There are lots of complex things to take into account about cloning. Your article didn't bring any up. Our language isn't in any peril here, nor are our views of kinship. If your point is simply that "gosh there are a lot of weird possible scenarios that could stem from a clone"... well, I think people have been hip to that ever since "Boys From Brazil."

(12/31)