A Sad Case For Cloning

Skull. Bones. Sweat pants and a sneaker. The only traces of a young woman buried under spring-thick foliage in Rock Creek Park. All that remains of 24-year-old Chandra Ann Levy, an intern who came to Washington, fell in love with a congressman and disappeared.

Initially, Levy's parents could not respond publicly to the news because her mother was "in such a bad emotional state of mind that we need time for her to grieve," said the parents' attorney.

As though there were ever enough time or tears to grieve the loss of a child.

It is a parent's worst nightmare. It is also relatively rare, thanks to tremendous gains in longevity over the past century. But in an era of smaller family size, the death of one child can wipe out a whole generation or reduce it by half.

As I think of the grieving parents, the idea comes to me: Is this a circumstance that would justify cloning a human being?

Condemnation of reproductive cloning is virtually universal. For now, the question is moot because the method is neither safe nor effective. But the technology is likely to improve. If human cloning were to become a realistic option, would there still be a consensus that its use should be banned?

No one wants to talk about it. "We've run into a problem of political correctness," says R. Alta Charo, professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin Law School in Madison. "There's widespread distaste for reproductive cloning. To state that it should be legal, if safe, would make you a lightning rod" for attacks in the current cloning debate. "No one has been forced to come out of the closet with an opinion on this issue."

Yet many medical practices are distasteful or odd or morally repugnant. They still don't warrant being banned. That's why human cloning deserves a more public discussion.

It helps to put this technology in the context of sweeping demographic shifts. For starters, the culture of death has changed. In the past, the death of a child was a common event. Visit any cemetery in New England and count the headstones of infants and children. Listen to the passionate music of Gustav Mahler, whose childhood was marked by his siblings' deaths. Or read Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes" and weep for his dying brothers.

Today, with life expectancy at its peak, more than 98 percent of Americans survive at least to their 25th birthday.

The culture of childbearing has changed. too. A century ago, couples had four, eight, 12 children so that some would survive into adulthood and continue the family line. Large families were insurance against being left with no survivors.

Today, American women have far fewer children in part because of the expectation that virtually all will reach adulthood. In the last 50 years, the birthrate has fallen to just barely above replacement level -- 2.13 children for every woman.

When death strikes the young -- and roughly 70,000 Americans under the age of 25 die each year -- the impact on the family is devastating.

This is why the option of human cloning deserves serious consideration. It could play a role as a kind of reproductive insurance for parents who lose a child -- particularly their only child.

More than a century ago, a woman in Ohio had eight children. The first one, a daughter, died at age 20, shortly after giving birth to a baby girl. That infant was my grandmother, who was raised by her grandparents. She was treated as the baby sister by her aunts and uncles. She blended into the family.

Today, the scenario might go like this. A couple has one child, a daughter, who dies at age 20. The mother has become infertile. So she turns to cloning technology, which jump-starts her daughter's genetic blueprint into an embryo, which can be implanted in the mother's uterus and carried to term. The infant is then raised by the bereaved couple, just as my grandmother was.

To be sure, the cloned infant is not the same person as the child the couple lost. Cloning merely produces an embryo with a particular genetic blueprint. It does not re-create the original person, who was shaped by experience and environment. Parents cannot get their child back through cloning.

In a similar way, my grandmother was very different from her mother, although she had the same pale blue eyes and wide cheeks. The grandparents who raised her still grieved their daughter's death. But I imagine they were glad that something of the daughter they lost could continue in future generations.

Wouldn't that be the same situation with a cloned child?

Is all this really so abhorrent?

Congress is debating the future of cloning. The House, supported by the Bush administration, wants to ban all forms of cloning technology. On the other side are those who would ban reproductive cloning but permit the use of research cloning to design treatments for a range of diseases from Parkinson's to Alzheimer's.

Therapy, not procreation, is the great potential of this new technology. Even if safe and legal, reproductive cloning would likely have a very limited future. Most people would prefer to have children the traditional way, or at least with lower-tech assistance.

Would I do it?

I listen to Mahler's "Songs of the Deaths of Children" and grieve for the ones I have known who died too soon. The links in the human chain that span generations are not just about DNA, but also about memory, emotion and experience. I pray I am never faced with this question. In the end, I don't think I would turn to cloning. But the survival instinct is strong, and I wouldn't rule it out.

I certainly wouldn't keep others from doing it. This is the private zone of people's reproductive lives, where there are many ways to perpetuate a family.

Abigail Trafford can be reached by e-mail at trafforda@washpost.com. Join her on www.washingtonpost.com for a Health Talk discussion on Tuesday at 2 p.m.