One of the arguments (there are not a lot of them) in favor of cloning human beings is that it would allow single men and women, gay and lesbian individuals, and infertile couples to parent genetically related children.
One of the arguments (and there are many of them) against cloning human beings is that parents who choose their child’s genetic characteristics may tie expectations to those choices.
Who knew human cloning had anything in common with adoption? Adoptive parents may not choose all their child’s characteristics, but they often have the opportunity to limit their referral by ethnicity, gender, and medical history.
Parents who adopted domestically in decades past, as well as some who adopted internationally in more recent years, tell stories of walking past rows of bassinets or leafing through photo albums until one particular child tugged at their hearts. “We chose you,” they tell their children. Some children interpret this to mean acceptance and belonging; others interpret it to mean they could be “unchosen” if they don’t live up to that initial impression.
Reproduction Choices
Prospective parents have a limited number of choices they can make about their biological children. As proponents of cloning point out, when a human being selects a partner with whom to have a child — whether that is in a marriage or through the selection of a sperm or egg donor — that person is limiting the possibility of some genetic outcomes and increasing the possibility of others.
However, having a baby with a tall, athletic, intelligent musician doesn’t guarantee that the child will have the same qualities. There’s a lot of DNA available for that baby, some of which may not have manifested itself in either parent. I have a photograph of a great-grandmother that looks as though it’s a portrait of me dressed up in period clothing.
Scientists have developed some techniques that enable parents to select the sex of their child. These range from sophisticated methods of choosing the right point in a woman’s cycle for the prospective parents to have intercourse, to sperm-sorting for gender prior to intrauterine insemination, to pre-implantation genetic diagnosis for in vitro fertilization. Some countries have already prohibited gender-selection techniques, for fear of a gender imbalance within their population.
The assumption is that when parents choose traits for their children, they do so because they find those traits desirable. If one trait is more desirable than another, some argue, there must be some expectation attached to it.
Parents who wish to choose the sex of their child are often simply trying to balance their own families by having a child of each sex. While this doesn’t mean that they don’t have fantasies about what it will be like to have a child of a particular sex, these fantasies probably existed whether they chose their child’s sex or took the luck of the draw.
One of the most difficult challenges of all human relationships, but particularly of parenting, is letting go of our expectations of how we want or expect other people to be.
How Our Choices Affect Our Children
We base our expectations on our experiences, as well as on our worldviews. If someone demonstrates high intelligence, we expect that person to be headed for college (and perhaps graduate school) and a successful career. When people joke with the philosophy major about what he’ll “do” with that degree, it reflects a belief that intelligence is a tool to be used to gain influence in the world.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with believing that we should use the intelligence we have to make a contribution to the world. But parents should take care not to conclude that their worldview should be shared by their children.
As parents, of course, we feel an obligation to impart our values to our children. Those values are tightly wound up in our worldviews. Some adoptive parents believe so strongly in the power of nurture over nature that we become overly attached to the idea of environmental influence, that we believe our children will be “like us” in ways that have nothing to do with inherent abilities and traits.
This can be where we cross the line, where we move from creating an environment in which our children can develop a finely calibrated moral compass, to creating expectations about what it will look like when that compass is pointed at true north.
Letting Go of Expectations
Prospective adoptive parents still have more choices than biological parents do. We can choose the child’s birth culture, sex, race, and physical and mental health conditions. Even if human cloning one day does become a viable option, the cloned child will inherit the entire genetic package of her nuclear parent — the acne will accompany the academic ability.
And this choice places a huge burden on us — not to justify it, but to be clear in our own hearts about why we value the choice, and what it will mean to us if somehow it leads to a different outcome than we imagined. We must be very careful, during the months or years that we wait to become parents, that we do not allow our imaginings to become fixed, to become expectations.
We can’t control whether our children interpret a choice we make about them as a gift or an obligation. However, we are responsible for checking in with our own hearts, to be sure that we recognize that what is important — helping our children learn how to find true north, even though they will choose their own journeys to that point. And as long as our children are pointed in the right direction, we have done our jobs as parents.
