By Tiffany Smith
Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints should understand and take an individual stance on cloning issues, President Boyd K. Packer told young adults earlier this month.
“You don”t have to have a commandment for all things,” Packer said at a CES Fireside Feb. 2.
But so far, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has avoided giving its opinion on cloning, said LDS bioethicist Courtney Campbell, who recently wrote an article on religion and human reproduction to assist the National Bioethics Advisory Commission.
For the article, he researched the ideologies of major religions about cloning, but was unable to get a definitive statement on the topic from the Church of Jesus Christ.
“It took repeated efforts on my part to obtain any statement from the LDS church that I could include in my NBAC report,” Campbell wrote in an e-mail. “The statement I finally received simply referred to the Proclamation on the Family.”
But Campbell said this reference was not adequately specific for use in his article.
Published by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” states the following:
“God has commanded that the sacred powers of procreation are to be employed only between man and woman, lawfully wedded as husband and wife. We declare the means by which life is created to be divinely appointed. We affirm the sanctity of life and its importance in God”s eternal plan.”
But Duane Jeffery, BYU professor of integrative biolofy, said nobody knows what that answer means.
“The existing statement clearly indicates acceptance of normal sexual relations, but it has been difficult for health professionals to apply that to methods of assisted reproductive technology,” Jeffery said.
He explained that although in vitro fertilization and other laboratory practices are widely accepted by LDS church members, applying the Proclamation to those practices has been a matter of ambiguity.
It appears that BYU students and members of the church alike are being left to themselves to come up with an appropriate moral standard. Students in Richard Tolman”s bioethics class are attempting to do just that.
Steve Fowler, 24, the teaching assistant in the class who led a recent class discussion on cloning, quoted Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Oregon, who said he”d rather err on the side of health and healing than on the side of conservatism.
“A lot of people would say you”re playing God, but pretty much you”re furthering science for the good of humanity,” said Fowler, a zoology major from Cheyenne, Wyo.
Alexander Parent, 22, a senior from Provo majoring in chemistry said he thinks the moral issue with cloning is not so much about the ethics of creating life, but creating life that does not have a chance to lead a normal life.
Parent also said the existence of cloning technology has not shaken his belief in God.
“As a religious scientist, I don”t believe that scientific theory ever discounts God,” Parent said. “Science instead helps me understand how God did something. The fact is, science isn”t about being right, so much as it is about finding a theory that works for our abilities and current understanding.”
Members of BYU”s religion faculty say the “playing God” concept is a popular Evangelical viewpoint, but gospel differences give Latter-day Saints a unique perspective.
“The issue really is: when does the spirit enter the physical body?” said Douglas E. Brinley, a professor of church history and doctrine at BYU. “Latter-day Saints, I think, have a different view than other Christians on this matter.”
Brinley said the issue becomes important because it means the difference between destroying an organic substance or a human being. But the moment of ensoulment has not been fixed concretely, even within the church.
“When do Latter-day Saints believe that a spirit enters the body?” he said. “Some people believe it”s at conception. I think that most have never thought about it.”
Brinley says being unfamiliar with premortal existence makes other Christians uncertain of when life begins. As a result, they are wary of destroying embryos.
Evangelical Christian Matt Bell disagrees with Brinley”s summary.
“On when life begins, I think the question is irrelevant,” he said. “The dignity of human life is great enough that it should compel us to the utmost to its preservation.”
Bell, a member of the Assemblies of God church and a computer science graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, said as young humans, embryos should be given the same protections as adults.
“The principle here is related to the ”presumption of innocence” employed in the U.S. legal tradition,” Bell said. “I presume the humanity of my object until convinced beyond all reasonable doubt that it is non-human or non-alive. I am not so persuaded of embryonic human life, and so am opposed to its destruction.”
Brinley argues that an embryo should not be considered to be alive, citing the church”s differing policies about abortion and murder as evidence.
“Latter-day Saints theology does not say that the spirit enters the body at conception,” Brinley said. “I would argue that you can”t put a full-grown adult spirit into a two-celled organism. There has to be sufficient body mass for a spirit to enter a body. That is why Brigham Young said: ”when the mother feels life come to her infant, it is the spirit entering the body preparatory to the mortal existence” (JD 17:143). A woman doesn”t know she is pregnant the first month — and it usually takes four months before she feels life.”
As a religion professor, Brinley said he is not concerned by therapeutic cloning.
“Growing cells in the laboratory for medical reasons may benefit mankind in ways we have not thought of before,” Brinley said. “That is why Senator Hatch is in favor of it.”
Bell doesn”t think there”s a distinction.
“I think my view is mostly on the side of ”there is no artificial embryo creation,”” Bell said. “A human life is a human life regardless of where it is produced — a woman”s body or a test tube.”
Brinley does, however, discourage reproductive cloning.
“The church would be against cloning a person, it seems to me, because it isn”t consistent with our theology relative to the procreative powers of men and women within marriage,” he said.
