大学英语综合教程 第三册 8textB

[02:08.34]-- fierce debate arose over the pros and cons of trying to clone a human being.
[02:14.45]4 People spoke of the plight of infertile couples; the grief of someone who has lost a child
[02:21.48]whose biological rebirth might offer comfort;the prospect of using cloning to generate donors for tissues and organs;
[02:30.96]the possibility of creating genetically enhanced clones with a particular talent or a resistance to some dread disease.
[02:39.61]5 But others saw a nightmarish and decidedly unnatural interference with human reproduction.
[02:47.08]California enacted a ban on human cloning,
[02:50.95]and the President’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission recommended making the ban nationwide.
[02:58.36]6 That initial debate has cooled, however,
[03:01.84]and many in the scientific field now seem to be wondering what all the fuss was about.
[03:07.98]7 They are asking whether human cloning isn't just a small step beyond
[03:13.25]what we are already doing with artificial insemination,in vitro fertilization,
[03:19.78]fertility enhancing drugs and genetic manipulation. That casual attitude is sure to give way
[03:27.93]before long to yet another wave of prohibitionist outrage--a wave that I no longer feel comfortable riding.
[03:36.22]8 I certainly don't subscribe to the view that whatever technology permits us to do we ought to do.
[03:43.09]Nor do I subscribe to the view that the Constitution necessarily guarantees every individual the right to reproduce
[03:51.73]through whatever means become technically possible.
[03:55.42]9 Rather, my concern is that the very decision to use the law to condemn, and then outlaw,
[04:02.36]patterns of human reproduction--especially by appealing to vague notions of what is “natural”
[04:08.82]--is at least as dangerous as the technologies such a decision might be used to control.
[04:14.85]10Human cloning has been condemned by some of its most articulate opponents
[04:20.44]as the ultimate embodiment of the sexual revolution,
[04:24.65]separating sex from the creation of babies and treating gender and sexuality as socially constructed.
[04:32.30]11 But to ban cloning as furthering what some see as culturally distressing trends may, in the end,
[04:39.51]lend support to strikingly similar objections to surrogate motherhood.
[04:45.15]12 Equally scary, when appeals to the natural, or to religious laws,
[04:50.48]lead to the criminalization of some method for creating human babies
[04:55.78]we must come to terms with the inevitable: the prohibition will not be airtight.
[05:02.16]13Just as was true of bans on abortion and on sex outside marriage,
[05:07.83]bans on human cloning are bound to be hard to enforce.
[05:12.29]And that, in turn, requires us to think in terms of a class of potential outcasts
[05:18.88]-people whose very existence society will have chosen to label as a misfortune and, in essence, to condemn.
[05:27.03]14One need only think of the long struggle to overcome the stigma of illegitimacy for the children of unmarried parents.
[05:35.02]3) How much worse might be the plight of being judged morally incomplete by virtue of one's man-made origin?
[05:42.47]15 There are some black markets (in drugs, for instance) that may be worth risking
[05:48.26]when the evils of legalization would be even worse. But when what we prohibit takes the form of human beings,
[05:56.96]the stakes become enormous.
[05:59.47]16 There are few evils as grave as that of creating a caste system, one in which an entire category of persons,
[06:07.67]while perhaps not labeled untouchable, is treated as not fully human.
[06:13.37]17 And even if one could enforce a ban on cloning, or at least insure that
[06:19.87]clones would not be a mistreated caste, the social cost of prohibition could still be high,
[06:27.06]For the arguments supporting a rigid prohibition of cloning are most likely to rest on, and reinforce, the notion that
[06:35.76]it is unnatural and wrong to cut the conventional links between marriage and the creation and upbringing of new life.
[06:45.00]18 Moreover, a society that bans acts of human creation for no better reason than that
[06:52.79]their particular form defies nature and tradition is a society that risks cutting itself off from vital experimentation,
[07:02.69]thus losing a significant part of its capacity to grow. (4) If human cloning is to be banned,
[07:10.03]then, the reasons had better be far more compelling than any thus far advanced.
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