There'll Never Be Another You

Ronald Bailey | August 10, 2001

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Opponents of this research claim to worry that embryos cloned for therapeutic purposes might be diverted and used to clone babies. It may well be true that therapeutic cloning research might make reproductive cloning easier to do, but should therapies or technologies be banned because they could be abused? If potential for abuse were the threshold, Congress would be very busy banning such things as automobiles, pain medicines, whiskey and tattoos.

Foolish Claims

The Senate will have a chance to consider this issue when it returns from vacation and senators must not allow themselves to be stampeded by the foolish claims of a few quacks into criminalizing the potentially very beneficial research on therapeutic cloning.

In the meantime, for the sake of infertile couples who look to reproductive cloning as a way of having kids one day, and for the sake of those kids themselves, a moratorium on human reproductive cloning should be instituted, enforced either by professional sanctions, or by law if necessary.

This article appeared in the August 10, 2001 Wall Street Journal.