It will also require the donation of hundreds of eggs from women who are prepared to have their eggs used to produce embryos that can be cloned. Although identical twins share the same genetic make-up, they are not deliberate, planned copies of their parents or any other relatives created by asexual reproduction. Identical twins are the same genetic age as each other, whereas a cloned child would be genetically the same as a parent or another human of a different age. Therapeutic cloning will involve the use of human cloned embryos, which will be used to produce stem cells, in order to create tissues. This therefore necessitates the destruction of the embryo.
CARE believes, as do many others, that human life begins at conception.
Even those who do not hold this view generally acknowledge that human embryos do have a special status and should not be misused in any way, particularly on the scale necessary for the research that would be needed for therapeutic cloning. We do not see any moral distinction between an embryo, a postnatal baby and an adult and would argue that it is not right to treat a human being at any stage of development as a 'thing' to be used and abused to further the ends of science. Individuals should not be created solely for their body parts and should not be the subjects of experiments without their personal knowledge and permission. Some argue that because the law already allows experiments on embryos up to 14 days old, the use of cloned embryos created by nuclear replacement raises no new ethical issues. These embryos would be produced specifically as a means to harvest cells, known as stem cells that can then be used to produce different types of body cells, such as skin.