Most of the ethical questions raised by cloning were already with us.

The Ask a ScienceBlogger question of the week is:

On July 5, 1996, Dolly the sheep became the first successfully cloned mammal. Ten years on, has cloning developed the way you expected it to?

On the technical end of things, I suppose I’m a bit surprised at how challenging it has been to clone certain mammals successfully, but getting things to work in the lab is almost always harder than figuring out whether they’re possible in theory. I expected, of course, that some would want to try cloning humans and that others would declare that cloning of humans should be completely off limits.
But as far as the discussions of the ethics of cloning go, I expected that more people would recognize that many of the ethical worries that flow from cloning were already with us.

“People who want their children to be little copies of themselves will get cloned!” There were already people out there, making babies the low-tech way, largely motivated by the hope of having little copies of themselves. Indeed, it’s hard not to think that at least some of the time, money, and discomfort people put into high-tech infertility treatments (as opposed to adopting) might be motivated by this kind of desire.
Whether or not there’s anything wrong with wanting a little copy of yourself, this isn’t something we completely escape by prohibiting human cloning.
“Cloning will muddy the question of who the clone’s parents are!” How do you properly score the contributions of the donor of the eggs whose somatic material is removed, the donor of the DNA that gets put in it, and the driver of the uterus in which the clone gestates? These are reasonable questions — but nothing we haven’t seen before in an age of sperm donors, egg donors, and surrogate mothers. Our existing reproductive technologies had already made “parenthood” a more interesting exercise in classification.
“We don’t know if cloning could lead to harms down the road to a child born of this technology!” This seems a fair concern. But we didn’t know whether in vitro fertilization might have unforseen consequences down the road, either. We don’t know which of the genes we transmit to offspring in technologically unaided reproduction might lead to harms.
Our knowledge of the future is pretty tentative till the future arrives. It was that way even without cloning on the table.
“Clones won’t have their own identity!” Tell that to my (identical) twin nieces. Indeed, a clone and the person whose DNA is used to make the clone wouldn’t even be gestating at the same time in the same uterus, so they’d have even less in common with each other than your typical set of identical twins. Sharing DNA doesn’t make them interchangeable.
“Human cloning will lead to an impoverishing of our gene pool, which would be bad.” One could make an argument that the heritability mix-and-match that accompanies technologically unaided reproduction is generally a good thing, helping us not to concentrate too many recessive genes for potentially harmful traits in any one individual. This actually seems like a reasonable argument to avoid making human reproductive cloning the norm.
But there are all manner of other ways our shared gene pool might be impoverished that would exist even if human cloning never happens. First cousins having babies with each other too many generations in a row could get the job done. So, perhaps, could certain choices in response to prenatal genetic screening (whether in utero or in vitro). Imagine if all prospective parents elected for tall, right handed sons. That could impoverish our genetic diversity right quick, with nary a clone in site.
I’m not claiming there aren’t legitimate ethical questions we would want to ask if the technical hurdles to human cloning are cleared. (Indeed, Glenn McGee lays out more of them here.) But most of these are ethical questions that were already in our laps. Don’t put them all on cloning.