It's a Bird. . . It's a Plane. . . It's Superclone
By Katha Pollitt,
The Nation
| 08. 06. 2001
Our fears about human cloning are unfounded and naive
Is human cloning a feminist issue? Two cloning bans are currently
winding their way through Congress: In the Senate, the Human
Cloning Prohibition Act seeks to ban all cloning of human cells,
while a House version leaves a window open for cloning stem
cells but bans attempts to create a cloned human being. Since
both bills are the brainchildren of anti-choice Republican yahoos,
who have done nothing for women's health or rights in their
entire lives, I was surprised to get an e-mail inviting me to
sign a petition supporting the total ban, organized by feminist
heroine Judy Norsigian of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective
(the producers of Our Bodies, Ourselves) and signed by Ruth
Hubbard, Barbara Seaman, Naomi Klein and many others (you can
find it at www.gene-watch.org).
Are feminists so worried about "creating a duplicate human"
that they would ban potentially useful medical research? Isn't that
the mirror image of anti-choice attempts to block research using stem
cells from embryos created during in vitro fertilization?
My antennae...
Related Articles
CGS is excited to announce the launch of a new anti-eugenics initiative that has been years in the making. Legacies of Eugenics in Science, Medicine, and Technology kicks off with a monthly essay series published at the Los Angeles Review of Books that will expose and contest the reemergence of eugenic ideas in contemporary health sciences, human biotechnology, public health, and medicine. Community and campus-based events featuring the authors are also being planned. The project is a collaboration among CGS...
By Jason Kehe, Wired | 04.11.2024
God help the babies! Or, absent God, a fertility startup called Orchid. It offers prospective parents a fantastical choice: Have a regular baby or have an Orchid baby. A regular baby might grow up and get cancer. Or be born...
By Neel Shah, The Preprint | 04.11.2024
Years ago, I interviewed for a residency position at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Standing before the domed Victorian building at the campus entrance, I couldn’t help but be in awe of the history of the place, the great...
By Eleanor Hayward and Joanna Crawford, The Times | 03.29.2024
Gazing out at the Mediterranean from an idyllic rocky mountaintop, Sophie Hermann announced to her half a million Instagram followers that she had decided to freeze her eggs. Since that post in August, the 37-year-old former Made in Chelsea star...