Jacob Sullum, writing in Reason, examines the cloning controversy through a libertarian-tinted lens:

[President Bush’s Council on Bioethics chairman, University of Chicago bioethicist Leon]Kass’ most compelling argument against reproductive cloning is that it would frequently produce babies with serious birth defects. Most scientists agree that, given the current state of technology, trying to produce a cloned baby now would be reckless. But this objection will lose its force once the technology improves to the point where birth defects are no more likely in cloned babies than in babies produced the usual way.

Other objections focus on what life would be like for children who knew they were the identical twins of people born years before them. Wouldn’t they be torn between the desire to find their own identities and the pressure to be just like someone else, whether a parent, a dead sibling, a famous artist, or a Nobel Prize winner?

There’s no denying the potential for anguish in such situations, but it’s not clear that they are fundamentally different from the dynamics that exist in many families produced through conventional means. The government does not, and should not, try to prevent parents from molding their children into copies of themselves, treating them like replacements for lost loved ones, or pushing them to accomplish great things.

Such behavior, while it may be worthy of criticism, is not in the same category as beating or starving one’s children, and the cost of trying to stop it through state intervention would be unacceptable. The same is true of human cloning.

Sullum represents that rare breed, indeed — a “conservative” columnist not so blinded by contrived “moral” dilemmas that he can’t see the (statist) forest for the trees. Criticism, yes; state-sanctioned meddling, no.

[More on cloning from Sullum]

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