Cloning

            Imagine that you are one of the human clones that will be born. There is no doubt that this will happen sooner or later even if Clonaid's (a human cloning company) announcement turns out to be a hoax. And imagine yourself listening in to the current arguments for making cloning illegal. You hear people opining that cloning threatens human dignity, that it would be playing God, that it represents a slippery slope towards a dehumanized future, that everybody has a right to a unique or to an unknown genome, and so forth. How would it make you feel? To hear all these dignified people talking about you as if your very existence were a crime against humanity?.
             This "what-if" scenario helps you put things in perspective. There is one argument that, as a future clone, you might understand and agree with: concerns about the safety of the procedure. The argument that we should wait to try it on humans until we have perfected the method on animals makes some degree of sense. But even so, suppose you were a slightly deformed human clone and had to live your life handicapped? You would not want this. We all have a moral responsibility to oversee that the clone for who he/she is as a person, a unique human person, with just as much human dignity as those of us who were conceived in other ways. .
             "Even [the cloned sheep] Dolly's creator, Dr. [Ian] Wilmot, has said he "would find it offensive" to clone a human being. People are repelled by many aspects of human cloning: The prospect of mass production of human beings, with large clones of look-alikes, compromised in their individuality; the idea of father-son or mother-daughter twins; the bizarre prospects of a woman giving birth to a genetic copy of herself, her spouse, or even her deceased father or mother; the creation of embryonic genetic duplicates of oneself, to be frozen away in case of later need for homologous organ transplantation; the narcissism of those who would clone themselves; the arrogance of others who think they know who deserves to be cloned or which genotype any child-to-be should be thrilled to receive; the Frankensteinian hubris to create human life and increasingly to control its destiny; man playing at being God.