Common Cloning Misconceptions - Ethics Essay

Common Cloning Misconceptions - Ethics Essay
Human cloning is replication or making children into products.
Opponents of cloning often use these words to beg the question, to assume that children created by parents by a new method would not be loved. Similar things were said about babies born of other assisted pregnancy methods. I am sure that no one questions an otherwise sterile parent who is finally able to give birth because of advances in embryo implantation.

However, the opposite holds true in many cases: evolution has created us with sex drives such that, if we do not carefully use protection, children occur. Because children get created this way without being wanted, sexual reproduction is more likely to create unwanted, and hence possibly unloved, children than human cloning.
If cloning is just a new form of human reproduction, then it is constitutionally protected from interference by the state. Several Supreme Court decisions declare that all forms of human reproduction, including the right not to reproduce, cannot be abridged by government. Use of words such as "replication" and "commodification" are simply attempts at making cloning not seem just as apart of human reproduction as current methods.
Human cloning reduces biological diversity.
Population genetics says otherwise. Six billion people now exist, and most of them reproduce. Even if someone tried to create a superior race by cloning, it would fail, because cloned people would have children with non-cloned people, and the resulting genetic hybrids would soon be normalized. Cloning is simply a tool. It could be used with the motive of creating uniformity, or it be used for the opposite reason, to try to increase diversity (which would also fail, for the same reason).
People created by cloning would have less right than normal humans, or would be sub-human.
A human who had the same number of chromosomes as a child created sexually, who was gestated by a woman, and who talked, felt, and spoke as any other human, would ethically be human and a person. It is by now a principle of ethics that the origins of a person from mixed-race parents, unmarried parents, in vitro fertilization, or a gay male couple hiring a surrogate mother, do not affect the personhood of the child born. The same would be true of a child created by every deviation from normal reproduction. Children created by sperm donation, in vitro fertilization, and surrogate motherhood were predicted to be less-than-human, but were not.