Word: vitro
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...plundering the bodies of the poor? Or maybe we'll just clone for the fun of it. If you like a movie scene, you can rewind the tape, so when Junior gets all pimply and nasty, why not start over with Junior II? Sooner or later, among the in vitro class, instant replay will be considered a human right...
...fact, any culture that encourages in vitro fertilization has no right to complain about a market in embryos. The assumption behind the in vitro industry is that some people's genetic material is worth more than others' and deserves to be reproduced at any expense. Millions of low-income babies die every year from preventable ills like dysentery, while heroic efforts go into maintaining yuppie zygotes in test tubes at the unicellular stage. This is the dread "nightmare" of eugenics in familiar, marketplace form -- which involves breeding the best-paid instead of the best. Cloning technology is an almost inevitable...
Besides, if we truly believed in the absolute uniqueness of each individual, there would be none of this unseemly eagerness to reproduce one's own particular genome. What is it, after all, that drives people to in vitro rather than adoption? Deep down, we don't want to believe we are each unique, one-time-only events in the universe. We hope to happen again and again. And when the technology arrives for cloning adult individuals, genetic immortality should be within reach of the average multimillionaire. Ross Perot will be followed by a flock of little re-Rosses...
...easy to demonize the unknown, and scientists like Stillman suffer the consequences. He and his team had no desire to mass-produce babies; they were simply extending their research in the field of in-vitro fertilization, using every means at their disposal to help couples who are unable to have children. Yet they found themselves condemned on all sides. Japanese doctors called their experiment "unthinkable," and the Vatican accused them of opening the door to "a tunnel of madness...
...what about the customers of these scientists? The boom in in-vitro fertilization has only occurred because some couples will go to any lengths to conceive a child. If would-be parents stopped at natural barriers, Stillman and his team probably never would have split embryos in the first place--it certainly would not have made the cover of Time...