Human Cloning
Was reading an article on cloning & the New England Journal of Medicine in the National Review, and was once again struck by the oddness of the cloning debate.
For some reason, the leftist view is that it is wrong to clone a human being and let him be born (so-called reproductive cloning—really, all cloning is necessarily reproductive, as it's the reproduction of a particular person). This, although in-vitro fertilisation is alright. But OTOH, they argue for the necessity of what they euphemistically call therapeutic cloning: the cloning and subsequent destruction of a person. It's a wonderfully Orwellian turn of phrase, that: to give life and then take it is therapeutic; war is peace; freedom is slavery. Nothing any Nazi, Communist or socialist every came up with was so grotesque, so evil, so intellectually illegitimate.
Of course, the root cause of this disconnect is the current refusal to recognise the embryo as a true person, albeit one which is not fully developed (much like an infant, toddler or teenager is a person, but hardly at the height of competency). Interestingly enough, it was medical men in the 19th century who discovered that the embryo was an individual, pushing for laws against that form of infanticide commonly called abortion. In the 20th century many physicians supported the doing-away of those laws; in the 21st, they are wanting to create children specifically to destroy them. What next?
