Should human cloning be banned?

Encyclopedia of Opinion

Question: Should human cloning be banned?
Position‹2 of 2: No, human cloning should not be banned
Argument1 of 2›: Human cloning is similar to IVF

Ethically, human cloning is no different to in vitro fertilization.

The argument

The argument begins by unsettling the idea that there is an unassisted baseline to defend. Essentially, all reproduction is now done with some sort of medical help, whether during delivery or before. Truly natural human reproduction would mean 50 percent infant mortality and make pregnancy-related death the primary killer of adult women, so the intervention that opponents of cloning treat as the deviation is in fact the norm, and the alternative is not a purer version of the same thing but a far more dangerous one. The comparison is then made specific. The cloning procedure is similar to in vitro fertilization (IVF), a medical procedure whereby an egg is fertilized by sperm in a test tube or elsewhere outside the body. The only difference is that the DNA of sperm and egg would be replaced by DNA from an adult cell. Everything else, the setting, the manipulation, and the fact that conception occurs outside the body under laboratory conditions, is shared, which is why proponents press the question: what law or principle, secular, humanist, or religious, says that one combination of genetic material in a tube is fine, but another is not? The final move is historical, and concerns how objections of this kind have fared before. In 2018, it was reported that about "1.6 percent of all U.S. births used IVF." In the beginning IVF was very controversial, but through countless trials and errors, it became successful and frequently practiced all over the world, so a procedure once treated as an affront now accounts for a measurable share of births. With enough funding and technology, proponents ask, who is to say cloning won't be as successful and then widely accepted? Because human cloning is similar to IVF in method, and likely similar in trajectory, they conclude that it should not be banned.

Premises

[P1]Cloning is technically similar to IVF — fertilisation outside the body — differing only in that the genetic material comes from an adult cell. [P2] No clear principle explains why one combination of genetic material in a tube is acceptable but the other is not. [P3] IVF was once controversial too, yet became successful and widely accepted, as cloning could. [C] Therefore, because human cloning is similar to IVF, it should not be banned.

Counter-arguments

The cloning process might be similar to IVF, but the outcome is the major difference and it’s highly unethical. About 90 percent of clones fail and if they live past early childhood, they develop some sort of medical problem that proves to be fatal.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The process might be similar, but the DNA material is different, which can be seen as strange and unethical.