Ethical attitudes on human cloning among professionals in Taiwan and the policy implications for regulation.

• Author: Yang, Che-Ming

Abstract: This research focused on understanding the attitudes toward human cloning in Taiwan among professionals in healthcare, law, and religion.

Design: The study was conducted utilizing a structured questionnaire. Participants: 220 healthcare professionals from two regional hospitals located in Taipei, 351 religious professionals in the northern Taiwan and 711 legal professionals were selected by to receive questionnaires. The valid response rate is 42.1%

Main measurements: The questions were generated by an expert panel and represented major arguments in the human cloning debate. There were a total of six Likert scaled questions in the questionnaire. The responses were coded from 1 to 5 with 1 representing strong opposition to human cloning, 3 representing a neutral attitude; and 5 representing a strong favorable attitude toward human cloning.

Results: Healthcare professionals had the highest overall average score of 2.14 and the religious professionals had the lowest average at 1.58. All three categories of respondents' attitude toward cloning ranged from mild opposition to strong opposition to human cloning. The religious professionals were more strongly opposed to cloning. Age, education, and religion significantly influenced attitudes toward cloning. Professionals between fifty-one and sixty years old, those with less education, and Roman Catholic professionals were more strongly opposed to cloning.

Conclusions: Religious professionals were more strongly opposed to human cloning than professionals in healthcare or law. Younger professionals as an age group demonstrated less opposition to human cloning. Regulation of human cloning will be influenced by professionals in healthcare, law, and religion, and the regulatory environment chosen now will play a pivotal role in influencing the acceptance of human cloning in the future.

Background and Objectives

Since the cloning of Dolly the sheep, people have been inundated with reports of the cloning of all sorts of life forms, such as cows, monkeys, etc. Cloning animals may not sound as frightening as cloning humans, but the concept of cloning is still confusing for many people.

Although human cloning has become a widely discussed ethical issue, people can easily lose their focus among various perspectives on human cloning. In order to clarify our discussion, we will use vocabulary consistent with the definitions given by the U.S. President's Council on Bioethics (hereinafter "President's Council"). Human cloning was defined by the President's Council as "asexual production of a new human organism that is, at all stages of development, genetically virtually identical to a currently existing or previously existing human being." (1) Thus, human cloning is "accomplished by introducing the nuclear material of a human somatic cell (donor) into an oocyte (egg) whose own nucleus has been removed or inactivated, yielding a product that has a human genetic constitution virtually identical to the donor of the somatic cell." (2)

The President's Council separated human cloning into two categories in view of their purposes: (1) cloning to produce children and (2) cloning for biomedical research. (3) Cloning to produce children is also popularly known as reproductive cloning and cloning for biomedical research is also known as therapeutic cloning. (4) This dichotomy sharply demarcates the boundaries of two groups of thought and has divided opinions in the U.S. Congress as well. (5)

Most countries still ban all human cloning; while some allow research for therapeutic cloning to a limited extent. There is little international consensus on the regulatory framework for human cloning. (6) Taiwan is no different from other nations. According to Taiwan's fetal stem cell research ethical guidelines, fetal stem cells may only be harvested from dead fetuses from abortion or failed assisted reproductive attempts, and a moratorium on cloning fetuses remains in effect. (7) On the other hand, reproductive cloning is also banned under the assisted reproduction rules of Department of Health of Taiwan. (8)

This study focuses on the attitudes on human cloning in Taiwan among professionals in healthcare, law, and religion. People of these professions are more likely to be the opinion leaders on whether human cloning should be legalized. Further understanding of their preferences will provide a unique perspective of how this ethical dilemma is likely to resolve. In the conclusion, the study results will be interpreted to answer two questions: (1) whether there are differences in attitude toward human cloning among these professions; and (2) whether personal characteristics influence attitudes toward human cloning.

Study Descriptions

There have been numerous surveys worldwide on this issue. Most of them are popular surveys. This study focuses on the attitudes of professionals, specifically those in healthcare, law and religion. This study was conducted utilizing a structured questionnaire. The questions were generated by an expert panel and presented major arguments in the human cloning debate. The content validity index (CVI) of each question has to reach 0.86 in order to stay in the questionnaire. After validity and reliability tests, a total of six Likert scaled questions remained in the questionnaire. The value of Cronbach's alpha is at 0.8046.

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