Ethical questions as only my friends could come up with...

[arib]

bluepapercup and I were chatting, and the following dilemma ensued:

Given that bluepapercup needs help taking care of two hypothetical ponies and I live too far away to help her, she's generously offered to clone me. Would my clone be Jewish, and would she be obliged to raise him that way? I mean, somebody's got to muck the stalls on Saturdays.

Here's what we came up with:

According to Orthodox Judaism, a person's status as a Jew is determined by his or her mother. So, who's my clone's mom? Is it my mother, since all of clone-Ari's DNA comes from me? Is it any surrogate mother that might be needed to carry a clone baby to term? Is it the egg donor who gave up an oocyte for us to extract the DNA from to insert my own? What if clone-Ari was grown in a vat? Vats can't be Jewish, they're inanimate!

Your thoughts?

Comments

[bluepapercup]

Right, I am more concerned with whether I have a moral/ethical/religious duty to raise the (probably vat-grown) clone Ari as Jewish. I'm Jewish by birth but not by practice, and so, hypothetically, would only raise the clone Jewish if required to.

If it is so that I must raise clone-Ari Jewish, must I help him to attain the same level of orthodoxy as his DNA donor, the "real" Ari? My feelings say yes, but I'm not sure.

[arib.livejournal.com]

hm.

Religious issues aside, I'd say let clone-Ari decide for himself, it's what I ended up doing. Sure, I ended up sticking with the religion I started out in, but it was ultimately my decision to do so. :-)

As to what the religion itself would say? I don't think we've figured that one out yet.

(and now you see why I don't bring my religious questions to my rabbi very often. They involve things like time travel on Shabbos, or telekinesis outside of an Eruv, things like that... *grin*)