What does cloning tell us about breaking the traditional concept of family?

Every one of us lives in a traditional family, with a father and mother, sons and daughters, and brothers and sisters in the same generation, which is the "cell" of human society - the family. The family is a form of organization of social life based on marriage and blood relations, and it arose naturally in the primitive society of mankind. Can we imagine a family without a father-son relationship or a mother-daughter relationship? It's unimaginable! And the birth of clones will bring great confusion to the concept of family.

One of the main reasons people oppose the birth of human clones is that people who are reproduced through asexual reproduction will completely mess up the concept of generations. That is to say, they and the donor of the cell nucleus is neither parent-child nor sibling relationship, they are similar to "monozygotic siblings", that is, those who look very similar to the twins or multiples. However, unlike twins or multiple births, there is an intergenerational age difference between them, i.e., from the age of the parents and children, but from the nature of the similarity of "one egg, multiple siblings", which will not be able to locate the ethical and moral, and legal inheritance relationship will not be able to locate.

From this point, we can know that once the clones are born, they will indeed give us a difficult problem and bring trouble to the traditional view of the family. However, in any science, including natural and social sciences, there is a process of raising questions and solving problems, including ethics and law. In ethics, the first to raise new problems should be in vitro fertilization (IVF), which has brought about the complexity of "inheriting the mother, nurturing the mother and raising the mother" as well as "inheriting the father and raising the father". But since 1978, when the world's first IVF baby was born, the total number of such babies worldwide has reached 3 million. Although some ethical disputes have arisen, there have been no ethical disputes that have created serious obstacles to social development. Cloned babies also have one less complication than IVF babies, that is, cloned babies only have the problem of "inheriting from the mother" or "inheriting from the father". I'm sure our ethicists will be able to solve this dilemma.

Of course, solving the problem between human cloning and the traditional view of the family is one thing, and whether or not to clone human beings is another. We are not saying that human cloning is necessary just because we can solve this dilemma. What's more, there are many technical problems with human cloning that need to be studied further.