Cloning and Musings on the Question of Creation

I love the television show "Orphan Black."  I think it's a great deal of fun.  I love watching Tatiana Maslany playing Sarah and Alison and Cosima and Helena and so on.  I really love watching Tatiana Maslany playing Sarah pretending to be Alison or Cosima - or that time when she played Helena pretending to be Sarah pretending to be Beth - or last week's episode where Sarah was fending off an attack by Daniel but then he's killed and the stark utter terror in her face when a knife-carrying bloody Helena (who is, remember, also played by Tatiana Maslany) comes in and hugs her - it's crazy fun.

Sarah (Tatiana Maslany) confers with her best friend and

foster brother Felix (Jordan Gavaris) who also happens

to be one of my favorite characters on the show

(photo courtesy of Entertainment Weekly)

I'm not quite so crazy about the role the church plays in the storyline though.  The twins Sarah and Helena were given away by the woman who carried them in her womb, one to the church and one to the state.  Both symbols of authority are presented pretty badly in the tale, but I think the church gets the worse end of the deal.  I don't know how this woman selected the religious organization to which she gave baby Helena, but she couldn't have chosen more poorly.  The "church" leaders who raise the baby clone into adulthood see her existence as a slight against God and abuse her beyond belief.

However, even in the midst of the loudly stated blasphemy of her very presence, it seems pretty clear to me that Helena is a human being.  A crazy one.  But who wouldn't be if s/he were kept in an animal cage, beaten, brainwashed, and told that s/he had no value.  It is no wonder that she is a self-hating and "sister"-murdering creature.

In light of that very obvious point, it is hard to understand the number of characters who loathe her simply on principle.  It is as though they cannot see what is literally in front of their eyes.  That is that a human clone would first be a human being.  Notwithstanding how the gestation process began, whether initiated by science or sex, I fail to see how a person is not created by God simply because the process by which he or she began life was different.

Clones have identical copies of DNA.  

(photo courtesy of Professor Alfred Cuschieri, 

"Fertilization and the First Week of Life")

I do understand that as people we change or mutate or evolve through the process of fertilization and that cloning does not use a sperm and an egg but rather is life recreated from a single donor.  I can even understand that cloning may be problematic for a wide variety of ethical reasons. But the argument that "only God can create life" is a specious one.  Yes, only God can create life.  However, is not God creating the life that begins in a petri dish, goes through the process of artificial insemination, and is then born of a mother who carried that child to term?  How would a clone by definition be any less inspirited by God than any other type of life?  However the miracle of life begins it is no less a miracle.