The modern era’s broadest consensus: refused by Rome, by the fiqh academies, by mainstream responsa, and by secular councils — on dignity, lineage, safety, and the ethics of the species, respectively.
Tagged: Genetics and biotechnology Catholic Jewish
Dolly (1996) made reproductive cloning a question of policy rather than speculation. The response was the broadest technology consensus of the modern era: legislatures and religious bodies that agree on nothing else agreed on this, each for its own stated reasons — which the register keeps separate, because the reasons are the content.
The Stance Register
Each stance is recorded with its rationale in the tradition's own terms and its sources. Where a tradition argues with itself, the register says so.
Catholic Condemned
Cloning is refused as a manufacturing of human life contrary to the dignity of procreation (Dignitas personae, §28): the clone is designed to a specification, and a person may not be made to another’s blueprint.
- Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dignitas personae (2008), §28
Islamic Condemned
The fiqh academies refused reproductive cloning at their 1997 Casablanca session and after, citing the confusion of lineage and the integrity of God’s creation, while permitting plant and animal cloning and cell research under conditions.
- Islamic Fiqh Academy, resolution on cloning (1997)
Jewish Condemned
Mainstream responsa refuse reproductive cloning on grounds of safety, identity, and the child’s open future, while recording minority arguments that a clone is simply a delayed identical twin — a natural event the tradition already accepts. The refusal is ethical, not metaphysical panic.
- Elliot N. Dorff, Matters of Life and Death (1998)
Secular and naturalist Condemned
The President’s Council and most secular bioethics bodies recommended prohibition on safety and on the ethics of manufacture; the secular case was made in the language of human dignity (Habermas’s ethics of the species) precisely where its authors could not use theology.
- Jürgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature (2001)
See this register as a side-by-side comparison
References
- UN Declaration on Human Cloning (2005)
- National Bioethics Advisory Commission, Cloning Human Beings (1997)
Related Across the Site
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- hesed Glossary Term — Steadfast love; covenant loyalty; mercy.
- mashiach Glossary Term — Anointed one.
- ruach Glossary Term — Breath; wind; spirit.
- Biblical Hebrew Language — The original language of the Hebrew Bible, preserved in the square script with Tiberian vocalization, and still the language of Jewish prayer.
- Embryonic stem cell research Technology — One premise, four outcomes: refused by Rome, commended by the responsa, regulated by the ensoulment line, and fought over inside evangelicalism — while every party funds the adult-cell alternative.
- Germline gene editing Technology — The technology every framework was waiting for: Rome refuses it, the responsa and the fiqh academies condition it, Hindu and Buddhist evaluations run on intention — and the academies of science govern it while disagreeing about whether it should ever be used.
- In vitro fertilization Technology — One procedure, five reasoned answers: refused by Rome on the inseparability of procreation and the conjugal act, permitted within marriage by Al-Azhar and by Jewish responsa, divided inside evangelicalism along the embryo line.