Cloning

Legality, Morality, and Ethics of Cloning Under ThirdComm

Under ThirdComm, cloning – that is, the cultivation and growth of whole or partial genetic facsimiles of persons and other fauna, whether cultivated in realtime or via catalytic processes – occupies a spectrum of legality, morality, and ethics.
To legally clone a person or their constituent parts requires informed consent from the donor. They must understand that full-body clones are their own persons, with their own subjectivity and personal rights. Nothing can give the donor legal authority over their facsimile unless the donor has requested a facsimile to raise as their own child. In the latter case, the donor is granted legal recognition of a culturally appropriate parent-offspring relationship, commensurate with all relevant mores, traditions, and legal rights.

Legal and Subjective Status of Clones

For all intents and purposes – legally, subjectively, practically – whole-body clones are individuals distinct from their donor. They are people, with their own legal rights and entitlements. The only way they differ from “natural-born” persons is that their genetic data is identical to that of their donor; they are otherwise indistinguishable.
Partial cloning is commonly used for medical purposes. Tissue, major organs, viable follicles, limbs, and bodily fluids – nothing capable of conscious or unconscious thought – are all regularly cloned to provide donors with exact-match replacements. In this context, too, donors must provide informed consent as defined by their culture or state before this type of cloning is allowed.

The History of Cloning and Flash-Cloning Under Second Committee and SecComm

Modern perceptions of clones are strongly weighted by the echoes and artifacts of recent history. Under the Second Committee, facsimile clones were a popular option for states, corporations, and other bodies in need of labor, constituents, or a ready supply of soldiers. The Anthrochauvinist government viewed clones not as individual persons, but as the legal property of their donors – a residual patriarchal construct that identified donors as the “progenitors” of their offspring, giving them full legal authority over beings that would not have existed without the donor’s intervention.
Essentially, facsimile clones – to say nothing of flash clones, explained in the following paragraphs – were second-class persons. Their individuality was recognized, but their legal rights were truncated on the basis that they were the results of “investments”made by their progenitors. Thus, they could be pressed into military, labor, or other dangerous services, with their owners only mandated to provide the bare minimum level of care – enough to ensure they didn’t die of hunger, thirst, or “reasonably preventable illness or exposure”.
Under SecComm, facsimile clones were widely used throughout the galaxy by state and private militaries, with specific martial traits emphasized by geneticists; at the same time, facsimiles conditioned in the company schools of corpro-states were used to staff many “soft” labor positions. In the Baronies particularly, facsimiles often occupied the highest echelons of society as ideal heirs, doubles, and tokens for the trade of pleasure or favors.
In times of crisis, or when a rush order needed to be filled, so-called “flash” clones were created instead6. Grown in artificial birthing chambers, flash clones could be cultivated from zygote to physically mature adult in less than five years. While flash-clone creation started from the same basis as facsimile clones – donated genetic material – the accelerated growth process that flash clones underwent was traumatic and prone to error. While facsimile clones have the duration of a natural life to learn, grow, and form their own subjectivity, flash clones were created for a task – filling out the ranks of armed forces, or replacing a depleted mining corps – and thus were considered to be disposable once the immediate task that required their production was accomplished.
Because of the traumatic growth and cognition-conditioning processes involved in flash-cloning, flash clones were prone to rapid onset degenerative diseases, atypical neurogenesis, a wide range of anomalous tumors, catastrophic immunodeficiencies, and many other chronic, terminal genetic illnesses. But the majority of people created in flash-cloning facilities did not live long enough to suffer the effects of the process that birthed them; the process was designed to churn out human bodies with speed, not accuracy, and to assign them one task with little regard for their rights, decency, or humanity. Third‐ Comm rejected whole-subjectivity flash-cloning outright as a core assumption of its Utopian Pillars.
A process influenced by the flash-cloning technologies developed during the Neo-Anthropocene Period (“rapid cloning”) still takes place, but it is reserved for medical constituent-tissue cloning: simple procedures where limbs, gross tissue, digits, or organs are needed to rectify a stable patient’s physical trauma. The materials needed to graft new skin after a burn, or transplant perfect-match organs and limbs where they have been severed or damaged, for example, – can be grown within hours of genetic mapping.

Cloning in the present

The cloning methods of old still exist in some places, filling in the gray spaces of legality and morality. Despite the outlawing of whole-body flash-cloning, it is allegedly practiced by Harrison Armory and a number of the larger Baronic houses. Progressive ThirdComm members regularly urge action to fulfill Union’s mandate and often task DoJ/HR with enforcing the ban against smaller targets. Meanwhile, the Armory and the Baronies argue that their flash-cloning methods are similar to those that came before in name only, and that their processes are much safer.
DoJ/HR’s Facsimile Rights Department frequently handles legal claims from facsimile persons and oversees cloning facilities, spot checks, and maintenance of public genetic proof data. Liberator teams commonly run point on regulation and enforcement actions targeting underground flash-cloning sites.
Lancers that are facsimile persons will likely have some knowledge of their genetic donor. Flash-clone PCs tend to be citizens (to some degree) of Harrison Armory or subjects of a Karrakin trade baron. Their natural lifespan may or may not be truncated as a result of the flash-cloning process. Lancers that are flash clones from somewhere other than the Armory or the Baronies might face more complications, and will likely be regarded as sympathetic witnesses in UN DoJ/HR investigations.

Although it is described here in the past tense, instances of flash cloning still occur. Despite ThirdComm’s prohibition, cases concerning states, corpro-states, and unscrupulous private entities purchasing or operating flash-clone programs make up a greater-than-zero percentage of the DoJ/ HR's caselog.