ing there is no chance of rejection as it is your tissue that is cloned. Think of how wonderful it would be if one of your family members or even you yourself could be saved because of therapeutic cloning.Birth DefectsIn the normal reproductive process many chromosomal abnormalities can occur during meiosis in the testes of men and the ovaries of women. When this happens if the child is born it can have major birth defects. Downs Syndrome is one such defect and is a result of an extra chromosome on the 21st chromosomal pair. The risk of having a Downs Syndrome baby increases with the age of the woman wishing to have a baby. Gina Kolata points out in her book Clone that"[w]ith cloning, such chromosomal mixups [sic] cannot occur,[a]fter all, you are starting with a normal cell, from a normal adult, with the proper number of chromosomes"(238).Cloning would also be very beneficial to people who are carriers of such diseases as sickle-cell anemia and Tay-Sachs Disease and cystic fibrosis. As they have only one gene for these diseases and it requires two genes to have the disease they are normal healthy adults, but they would not wish to pass on these genetic defects to their children. It its report to the president of the United States the National Bioethics Advisory Commission wrote of just one such scenario where both the husband and the wife are carriers of a lethal gene."Rather than risk the one in four chance of conceiving a child who will suffer a short and painful existence, the couple considers the alternatives: to forgo rearing children; to adopt; to use prenatal diagnosis and selective abortion; to use donor gametes free of the recessive trait; or to use the cells of one of the adults and attempt to clone a child. To avoid donor gametes and selective abortion while maintaining a genetic tie to their child, they opt for cloning(85).Ethical ConsiderationsOne of the arguments, that has been heard against cloning, is that to man...
