The new life will constantly be scrutinized in relation to that of the older copy. Wilson is also naive in believing that cloning can be confined to married couples seeking a remedy for childlessness. Cloning provides the powerful opening salvo in the campaign to exercise control over the quality of offspring. The dangerous attitude that sees children as products for manipulation rather than gifts to be treasured will be further accelerated. The right to reproduce is also being expanded to include a right to the type of child one wishes.
Parents already exercise some choice, through genetic screening, over the quality of their children.
Strange requests are already being voiced. Lobbyists for the congenitally deaf are seeking to abort non-deaf fetuses as part of their campaign to normalize deafness and to provide only deaf children for the deaf. Gay rights organizations urged the National Bioethics Advisory Commission to declare in favor of cloning. Even if human cloning is rarely undertaken, a society in which it is tolerated is no longer the same society any more than is a society that permits incest or cannibalism or slavery on even a small scale. It is a society that has forgotten how to shudder, that rationalizes away the abominable.