It's a Bird. . . It's a Plane. . . It's Superclone

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...