תשובות בנושא שיבוט

Regarding a teshuva on cloning, enclosed please find an article by Professor Avraham Steinberg and Dr. John Loike on cloning. This article will appear in the upcoming issue of our English-language journal of halakha and medicine, Assia-Jewish Medical Ethics (vol. 3, no. 2).

In response to your question about brain transplants, Professor Avraham Steinberg writes:

For now there is a complete moratorium on whole brain transplants. There is universal agreement that such a transplant is unethical because in order to obtain a good brain the donor must be killed, and according to halakha it is forbidden to kill one person in order to save another.

However, brain tissue transplants from miscarried or aborted fetuses—which, so far, have been unsuccessful—are halakhically permissible if they will be useful to the patient—for example, in the case of Parkinson’s disease—provided that the abortion was halakhically valid per se.