Would You Clone A Baby?

The idea of human cloning never seems very far from the news. The reality of cloning a baby is already here, with only a little nudge needed to make the practice 'acceptable'.

Fertility expert Panayiotis Zavos, founder of the Zavos Organization in Lexington, Kentucky, said to The Independent that "the cloned child is coming... There is absolutely no way that it will not happen." You can even watch the video of Zavos creating the embryos before injecting them into the wombs of women wanting cloned babies.

Transferring cloned human embryos into a womb is currently illegal in many countries, such as the UK and USA, but not in many other countries. Italian Severino Antinori told Oggi magazine that there are already three living human clones, all aged nine years old and living in Eastern Europe. The world is thus split on whether human cloning should go ahead or not. However, why would anybody want to clone a human?

The media loves to spread false futures. A picture of a girl killed in a car crash with the headline "The little girl who could 'live' again" spread the myth that a human clone is a perfect copy of a lost child. the loss of a child is tragic, but that unique individual human being has gone for ever. The motivations for cloning can actually be quite bizarre. For example, there are enquiries from couples who are infertile to clone the person with the fertility problem so that the new copy can possibly be fertile and therefore have children naturally. This latter logic is twisted and ironic in the extreme. It is also a very long wait to be legally able to procreate with the clone.

Cloning a dead child is not going to bring that child back. Yes, they may be genetically identical but we cannot, as yet, duplicate a person's mind so that the clone is really the same person. As soon as an embryo is created its development is subject to environmental influences, from the chemicals ingested by the mother to the experiences of childhood and life itself. The clone of a child may look the same but to live with the attitude that it is 'my dead baby come back to life' is to live with a major delusion that could be psychologically harmful to both the parents and the child.