Summary of Part Two

Abstract

Part 1 of this book outlined five common objections to human reproductive cloning and human clones: (1) the technology offends God and nature; (2) the technology threatens to reduce human beings to the level of manmade objects; (3) human clones are copies; (4) human clones threaten the survival of the human species; and (5) the technology is unsafe for participants and produces human clones with serious birth defects. I explained how these objections are based on, and inspire, stereotypes about human clones. Part 2 of this book moved on to public policy analysis. I described how anticloning laws work and how the five objections inspired the enactment of the laws. Next, reasoning by analogy to antimiscegenation laws, which once sought to prevent the birth of mixed-race children, I explained that anticloning laws are just another attempt to impose existential segregation on another unpopular class of humans. Construed narrowly, existential segregation simply excludes some human clones from existence. However, as Chapter 9 explained, this narrow interpretation does not do existential segregation justice. Existential segregation must be recognized as a broader form of discrimination that requires the government to injure the living deliberately. Anticloning laws target human clones for nonexistence before birth. This stigmatizes those who are born in defiance of anticloning laws. The laws, moreover, cannot succeed in preventing births unless they deter offshore cloning and punish lawbreakers. Thus, the laws exclude some cloned babies and children at the national border and take parents and parental assets away from others.