Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART ONE FIVE COMMON OBJECTIONS TO HUMAN REPRODUCTIVE CLONING REFLECT, REINFORCE, AND INSPIRE STEREOTYPES ABOUT HUMAN CLONES
- PART TWO ANTICLONING LAWS ARE BAD PUBLIC POLICY
- 6 What Anticloning Laws Say and Do
- 7 The Five Objections Have Inspired Anticloning Laws
- 8 Anticloning Laws Reflect a Policy of Existential Segregation
- 9 The Costs of Anticloning Laws Outweigh Their Benefits
- Summary of Part Two
- PART THREE ANTICLONING LAWS VIOLATE THE EQUAL PROTECTION GUARANTEE AND ARE UNCONSTITUTIONAL
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
9 - The Costs of Anticloning Laws Outweigh Their Benefits
from PART TWO - ANTICLONING LAWS ARE BAD PUBLIC POLICY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART ONE FIVE COMMON OBJECTIONS TO HUMAN REPRODUCTIVE CLONING REFLECT, REINFORCE, AND INSPIRE STEREOTYPES ABOUT HUMAN CLONES
- PART TWO ANTICLONING LAWS ARE BAD PUBLIC POLICY
- 6 What Anticloning Laws Say and Do
- 7 The Five Objections Have Inspired Anticloning Laws
- 8 Anticloning Laws Reflect a Policy of Existential Segregation
- 9 The Costs of Anticloning Laws Outweigh Their Benefits
- Summary of Part Two
- PART THREE ANTICLONING LAWS VIOLATE THE EQUAL PROTECTION GUARANTEE AND ARE UNCONSTITUTIONAL
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Antimiscegenation laws were bad public policy. Their costs outweighed their putative benefits.
The laws injured the men and women who were denied the fundamental right of marriage. The laws also injured the children of mixed-race couples by subjecting them to existential segregation and stigmatizing them as inferior. In addition, the laws denied mixed-race children legitimacy and the legal and social benefits of that status.
The legislatures that enacted antimiscegenation laws, and the courts that upheld them, disregarded these costs in favor of flimsy and speculative “evidence” regarding the supposed degeneracy and inferiority of mixed-race unions and children. This evidence included scientific studies purporting to establish that blacks are physically and mentally inferior to whites and that racial mixing leads to children who are inferior.
Today, most people recognize and acknowledge that antimiscegenation laws were bad public policy. Unfortunately, they have not recognized or acknowledged that laws against human reproductive cloning are bad public policy. Policymakers and lawmakers have emphasized the putative benefits of these laws and minimized or ignored their costs.
In this chapter, I seek to reverse this trend and provide a fresh public policy analysis of laws against human reproductive cloning. The chapter first identifies the costs that such laws impose – not only upon existing adults but also upon the innocent children who will be born through cloning technology.
Unfortunately, policymakers and lawmakers have virtually ignored the costs that anticloning laws will impose on human clones.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Illegal BeingsHuman Clones and the Law, pp. 109 - 146Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005