Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[Math Junkie]

I've done a little more reading, and you're right about cloned offspring being sickly:

http://www.nature.com/nsu/030217/030217-6.html

That certainly doesn't sound like the raw material for an effective army, but I would agree that the health and longevity issues are enough to justify ethical objections to human cloning for the purpose of bringing a fetus to term.

The other reasons you gave don't really hold water. Dolly was born to a surrogate sheep mother, as stated in the article linked below.

http://www.fda.gov/cber/genetherapy/clone.htm

If the concern is babies without parents, then bringing babies to term in vitro should be banned. I seriously doubt that we have the technology to do it anyway. It would certainly be going about it the hard way; the problems would be huge. Even if we had the technology, banning cloning would not be enough, because people could get around it by using traditional in vitro fertilization techniques.

Why would cloned babies be beholden to no one? Someone has to raise the child, no matter how it is conceived. The Romanian dictator you referred to did not have or need cloned children to accomplish his ends. Neither did Hitler. The only effect cloning would have had would have been to make the offspring sickly and short-lived. If children who are beholden to no one is the problem, depriving them of the normal parent-child relationship is a much more serious problem than how they were conceived.

What did the bill to allow a foreign army have to do with the cloning issue?

What does Hitler's interest in genetics have to do with anything? EVERY branch of science can be misused by unethical people. Hitler was responsible for development of the Volkswagen, but that doesn't mean Volkswagens are a force for evil today.