We recognize that, of course, in the hoary old joke in which a beautiful but dumb woman suggests to an ugly but brilliant man that the two have a child. Just think of how wonderful the baby would be, the woman says, with my looks and your brains. Aha, says the man. Theologians speak of the special status of a child, born of an act of love between a man and a woman. Of course, we already routinely employ infertility treatments, like donor eggs, semen banks, and frozen embryos, that have weakened these ties between the parents and the child.
Cloning entails the production, rather than the creation, of a child.
Elliott Dorff, a rabbi at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, said much the same thing. Each person involved has to get out of himself or herself in order to make and have a child. Cloning also poses a danger to our notion of mortality, Dorff said. The sense that there is a deadline, that there is an end to all this, forces us to make good use of our lives. It also forces us to question the powers of science.