Human cloning and child welfare

I'm sitting in the media centre here at UQ and there's a bubble of activity around me. Its nice to be back home.

So, on to human cloning and child welfare. This is one of the most contentious arguments against reproductive cloning. Those against human cloning propose that there will be a psychological impact on the child who has been cloned. There may also be dysfunctional aspects to the parent child relationship because the parent may project their personality on to the child. A child who has been cloned may be subject to ridicule and stigma because they are a clone.

If we broke down this argument, let's have a think about this....

Dysfunctional families, psychological impacts, teasing, ridicule, stigma.

Are these things that some children would experience anyway, regardless of whether they are a clone or not???

Certainly those who are born out of a natural process of reproduction or even IVF could be subject to any of these in the course of their lifetime. But where do we draw the line under who has a right to be a parent, and how that occurs? Particularly if the "owner" of the genentic material decides to reproduce it. However when there is any possibility of producing a human clone, there is an outcry from the media and organisations, and people, including myself sqirm a little bit in our seats. Why is that?

Next time I want to look a little more into why the concept of reproductive cloning makes us feel uncomfortable, and the ethics of some examples of human cloning.