This is your place to publicly comment on the topics and issues addressed in Speaking of Faith programs. React in a personal way, and put into words what this program meant to you.

Submit Your Reflection about "A Theological Perspective on Cloning."

Experiencing the Hunger (March 7, 2005)
Today's program (with Laurie Zoloth) included a poem or prayer for the first cloned human. If at all possible I would like to hear or read that again. How can I get that?

The prayer moved me a lot and answered for me a question I have had about genetic manipulation in agriculture. That is that unlimited desire from scientist to make the "perfect" plant or animal. And so often the "perfect" means cheaper, less open for disease, higher yielding, bigger, uniform size, and all those so very human economic based interests. And my question focused around where and how that "perfectionism" would end. And now these scientists would like to manipulate human genes and clone. And I looked for the passionate argument to take a stand and ask for stopping that cloning work. The poem or prayer would help me in that.

Maarten Samsom
Westford, VT (WVPS, 107.9 FM)

Experiencing the Hunger (May 22, 2004)
I greatly needed to hear the show on cloning and bioethics. I am a Christian woman experiencing infertility and have struggled with the moral issues, quite by myself until today. I find myself not wanting to go through with the medical process that is required for me to get pregnant, but for a long time I was very self-condemning. I actually felt frightened about parenting and its responsibilities. I felt that God had some purpose in me not being able to be like every other woman around me who could conceive so easily, but I could not figure it out. There was a hunger for motherhood (which was so beautifully named for me in Laurie Zoloth's article), but an inertia to start the process. And everyone around me seemed condemning of my inertia as well. I felt tremendous cultural pressure to pursue the thing I wanted so badly, to not let an obstacle block what I desired. That pressure seemed to focus on the blockage rather than on the object of my desire.

I greatly appreciated the view on justice that Laurie Zoloth brings to the argument. And while the topic was cloning, I see it as the whole of the infertility issue. If God is the author of life, how far do we go to make and preserve it? It seems in our culture that children are objects, possessions that reflect our significance to the world. We dress children like ourselves, we worry about what school they are in so that they can go to the best colleges and get the best jobs. Parents spend time bragging on their children and correcting them so that they reflect a good image of themselves. The child can get lost in the image making that goes into parenting. Can we love a child without expecting an outcome?

Laurie Zoloth pointed out that there are children in foster care who will not be parented because they are not a certain way. This is tragic and this convinces me to seek God again about his plans for me. I see now that adoption is a blessing to the world and that I should consider personally if this is the possible answer to my hunger for motherhood. I think now that the issue of finding ourselves reflected in a child's face does not come from that child looking like us, but comes from seeing ourselves in roles we were born to play. We find ourselves from giving love to another as we have been loved. God made us to so that he could love us; we, in turn, have the desire to bring children into the world to love them. Yet we are not the creator, he is, and as we are so different from him and yet he loves us, so we can love another who is not of our flesh.

Thank you for your program. My husband and I try to listen every week. This show has been a great help to us as we have weighed out spiritual issues in the past year, moving from one body of faith to another. Thank you for asking courageous questions and covering topics not normally heard even in faith-based settings.

Heather Huang
Flushing, NY (WNYC 820 AM)

Duty and Right (May 23, 2004)
This is a side issue brought up in the program, but good trees have lots of fruitful branches: I have long believed that every human being, from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death is entitled to human rights, a position I came to not from a fundamentalist reading of a scriptural verse, but from reflecting on our knowledge of genetics and medicine in light of philosophical anthropology — in brief, if we do not accord "humanity" to the newly conceived child (single cell though it is), when and how is it endowed with this humanity? (Note, for instance, that under the "viability" criterion that some use, humanity seems to be a function of medical technology — we have pushed viability of premature babies back from a birth at say eight months to one at six: have we also conferred humanity on children in the womb at six months therefore?).

In any event, my position on abortion, for instance, is therefore grounded in this notion of the rights of the human person — what each person is owed by the human community (and therefore by society, the state, etc.) simply because they are human. Professor Zoloth's point, that her own Talmudic tradition, as well as many other religious traditions (including Christianity) has generally grounded ethical arguments not in rights but in duties I thought was one of those ideas that's so obvious that it is therefore completely overlooked — I know I did.

It hasn't changed my position on issues like cloning, abortion, and so on, but it has given me a rich new source of questions on which to reflect, and certainly challenges me and other thinking pro-lifers to consider what an approach based on "duty" would mean in the practical details of advocacy and policy. Professor Zoloth's comment could, should really, force a shift in the debate from child's rights vs. mother's rights to the question of how we fulfill our duties to both without violating our duties to either.

Christopher Franz
Staten Island, NY (WNYC 820 AM)

Closing Story (May 23, 2004)
I was deeply touched by the closing story and the mother's appeal that we do all we can by way of kindness and compassion to bring about the world of justice that will precede the final coming. This program does indeed give a perspective from which to look at cloning and other ethical questions.

Betty Carpentier
St. Louis, MO (KWMU 90.7 FM)