Why doesn’t the BFS support human reproductive cloning?
• We know of no reason to try to clone a human other than curiosity and believe that any consequences would be disastrous. • We do know that experiments in many animal species suggest that there is a significant risk of harm occurring to the cloned embryo or young. • Dolly the sheep seemed to age prematurely and developed arthritis and lung disease before she was put down. • In most cases of animal cloning work the pregnancies terminate in miscarriages. Some 90% of fetuses will abort and many of these will occur late in the pregnancy. • Many cloned fetuses have shown gross abnormalities of development and it seems that this is a consequence of an inability to control their own growth. • Those young which have survived have a high rate of abnormality such as failure of organs to develop, increased birth size and disease of liver and kidney. • We believe that the likelihood of any development of a normal cloned fetus is minimal and, in the light of current evidence from animal research,
