Since Dolly the Sheep was cloned in 1996, the question of whether human reproductive cloning should be banned or pursued has been the subject of international debate. Feelings run strong on both sides. In 2005, the United Nations adopted its Declaration on Human Cloning to try to deal with the issue. The declaration is ambiguously worded, prohibiting "all forms of human cloning inasmuch as they...

The United Nations postponed again a controversial vote on the issue of therapeutic cloning of human stem cells, hampering the widely supported opposition to reproductive cloning but many countries are developing their own legislation.

Although there is widespread opposition to reproductive cloning, some have argued that its use by infertile couples to have genetically related children would be ethically justifiable. Others have suggested that lesbian or gay couples might wish to use cloning to have genetically related children. Most of the main objections to human reproductive cloning are based on the child's lack of unique ...

Contemporary debate and speculation about the prospect of reproductive cloning reveals the way in which such beings, as ‘copies’ of human originals, challenge notions of the human, especially in relation to issues of individuality, authenticity and origin. This article explores the representation of human cloning in Kazuo Ishiguro’s speculative fiction, Never let me go, published in 2005. It in...

In the March 2006 issue of EMBO reports, Christof Tannert, a bioethicist at the Max Delbrück Research Centre in Berlin, Germany, presented a moral argument against human reproductive cloning on the basis of Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative (Tannert, 2006). In this article, I address some problems with Tannert’s views and show that our concerns about this prospective procedure should promp...