E.V. Kontorovich

About the author: E.V. Kontorovich is a New York-based writer.

Advocates of human cloning stress its potential benefits but ignore the significant moral problems cloning would cause. Cloning takes the humanity out of reproduction, treats cloned humans as manufactured goods, and is similar to incest in the way it blurs and confuses family boundaries and relationships. Moreover, cloning as a scientific advance is unique in that it redefines humanity.

One year ago [February 1997], an obscure Scottish veterinarian named Ian Wilmut demonstrated how to make mammals, and by implication humans, in a laboratory without any act of sexual congress, indeed without sperm or an (intact) egg. Through cloning, a near-perfect genetic replica of a person could be grown from a single cell of skin, or, say, of rib. In the year since, cloning technology has...