Organ Harvesting and Human Emotion

Though Never Let Me Go isn’t one of my favorite novels, I learned a lot about human cloning from reading it. Before reading the novel, I had never really considered the situation that a human clone would grow up in and how human they truly would be. The characters in the novel are real people with real emotions, destined for death via organ donating.

Most other stories about human cloning show that the clones are instantaneously adults, never showing the childhood development that human clones would actually experience. (like in the completely terrible movie, Multiplicity)

Never Let Me Go takes the reader to the center of human clone development at Hailsham, a very nice human clone school for children. Every emotion that is typically considered to be human (see image below) is portrayed by the cloned humans during their growth, making it difficult to see some of the characters complete at the end of the novel. The clones really are human and seem to be no less human than non-cloned humans in the world. Kathy’s memories and emotions prove that clones should not be used for organ harvesting, even though they may want to due to brainwashing.

My reasoning for explaining the intense human emotion in the story is to prove my statement that I would not take an organ from a cloned human, unless that clone wanted to donate an organ when they died just like other humans can do if they choose. Throughout the human clone literature I have read in class, the human clones are just too human to justify killing them to harvest their organs. The relationship in Never Let Me Go demonstrate the reality of human clones, and that reality is that they are human beings just like everyone else. I would not be okay with taking organs from a non-cloned human, unless it was after they died and they consented to it, because they are another human just like me. This reasoning applies to cloned humans too, because they are also humans. While I am not okay with taking organs from human clones, I would definitely use a disembodied cloned human organ if available and necessary, since the death of human is not involved in the harvesting of the organ.

Lynne M.

~ by peacelovecake on February 11, 2010.