One can match his race or ethnicity and even select a sex, but beyond that he takes his chances. I am persuaded that if only married couples can clone, and if we sharply limit the sources of the embryo they can implant in the woman, cloning will be quite rare. Sex is more fun than cloning, and artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization preserve the element of genetic chance that most people, I think, favor. Dr. Kass is right to stress the mystery and uncertainty of sexual union. That is why hardly any woman with a fertile husband who could obtain sperm from a donor bank will do so.
Procreation is a delight.
Leon Kass Cloning turns procreation into manufacture. Wilson begins, as I do, with repugnance. He acknowledges his own instinctive recoil from the idea of human cloning but does not quite trust his sense of moral disquiet, and sets out to reason it away. That places the burden of proof on those who object to cloning rather than on the proponents. Worse, it requires that the reasons offered be finally acceptable to utilitarians who measure only in terms of tangible harms and benefits but who are generally blind to the deeper meanings of things.