Timothy J. Madigan

About the author: Timothy J. Madigan is editor of Free Inquiry, a humanist journal.

Human clones would be unique and special persons with the same human rights and qualities that all other people possess. It is opponents of cloning who threaten to stigmatize clones as copies or monsters. Society will have to protect the equality of clones. All truth passes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Second it is violently opposed. Third it is accepted as being self-evident.
—Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

Iwas a student at a Catholic high school in 1978 when the first successful in vitro fertilization case occurred, and I well remember the storm of controversy it caused. The events that ensued at the time met Schopenhauer's dictum above. First, comics like Johnny Carson had a...