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Argument: While illegal clones should have rights, a ban is still justified

Issue Report: Ban on human reproductive cloning

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John F. Kilner and Robert P. George. “Human Cloning: What’s at Stake”. The Center for Bioethics and Dignity. 2004 – “All human cloning—all creation of new human beings by asexual processes—should be legally prohibited. Yet even with proper laws in place, it is likely that someday someone would break the laws, creating and bringing to term a cloned human, or perhaps several such persons. It is important that we acknowledge in advance their human dignity and fundamental rights.

But the likelihood of such a birth by no means suggests that this demeaning practice should remain legal. Why not?

At the deepest level, cloning should be prohibited because it turns procreation into a species of manufacture. It treats a child-to-be as an object of production. In the words of Dr. Leon Kass, Chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, cloning “threatens the dignity of human procreation, giving one generation unprecedented genetic control over the next. It is the first step toward a eugenic world in which children become objects of manipulation and products of will.”

[…]This principle of inherent dignity should be applied with no less force to the cloned human being who is brought to birth and dwells among us. Once a human being exists, he or she is of no less value or dignity by virtue of the wrongful means by which he or she was brought into existence. Just as a human clone should not be killed before birth, he or she should not be discriminated against or in any way mistreated after he or she is born. The great political principle of human equality, rooted in the profound theological idea that men and women are made in the very image and likeness of God, demands no less. CBHD” [But, again, this does not mean that the practice should not be banned]