These egg cells don't grow on trees. They must be harvested from human beings. Egg cell harvesting is a complex process, requiring the donors (young women) to take experimental drugs with possibly harmful long term sideeffects.
If we are using human egg cells for experiments, or at some point in the future, for curing old people, aren't we exploiting the young woman we take those egg cells from?
The sucess rate of an IVF is relatively low, and the procedure to extract the ova is complex, inconvenient and not risk-free.
Ovaries are overstimulated to produce more than one egg. They are all collected and fertilized, but, usually, only two or three are implanted at a time, to balance the low success rate and the non-null chance of multiple pregnancy (that's how octuplets are made :\).
If a successfull pregnancy occurs before running out of embryos, the mother/couple may donate the remaining embryos for research (that's how it works in Belgium, at least).
e: I hate to complain about downvotes, but did totally miss your point here or something? I think this is a good conversation to have, and I was replying in good faith.
There is a significant proportion of feminists who are against prostitution and pornography because it exploits women's bodies, and your statement can be used as a potential argument to dislodge their beliefs.
On the other hand, it is more unacceptable to suggest at times a person might not be always fully rational, and even more unacceptable to generalize this to a group of people. So your statement has brought up a contradiction in the beliefs of a subset of people, which you're not supposed to do.
I'm sure that your comment is in good faith, and I'm not one of the ones who downvoted you. I only want to show you that, from this point of view, "informed consent" is not a good enough excuse for how these women are being used. (And I would also question whether these girls are truly "informed" about what's really going to be done to their children.)
But since by definition we would need to perform experiments on non-consenting humans to perfect the technique, there isn't any ethical way to get to there.
As such, it would be unethical to attempt to create a possibly failed human clone.
Note that they haven't managed it yet on monkeys (surprised me).
Prediction: when it's been working perfectly on all primates for quite a while, these laws may start to change... perhaps at first for special cases, such as infertile couples (or a clone of an infant who died of non-congential causes - I don't know what to make of that, it's simultanesouly creepy and tugs at my heart-strings). IVF programs have similar restrictions.
China will be the first to clone humans because they don't have our ethical restraints. Since China already is interested in eugenics, its easy to infer that they'll be interested in cloning geniuses.
It will get interesting if a large population of geniuses in China starts to tip the technological and military balance and whether other countries would feel compelled to respond.
Original source publication:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1934590914...
Identical twins are "natural" clones. They are genetically identical. (Barring mutation.)
People take issue with "artificial" or reproductive cloning.
If you reproductively cloned an identical twin, you would end up with three genetically identical people. One is just born later, with a more certain outcome.
[Edit: I am not advocating anything. This is a descriptive observation of genetics, not a normative one.]
It's pretty understandable and a default position to advocate for it, but it could be a slippery slope, and will definitely push the politics towards engineered babies over natural ones.
I don't think something having a natural analog makes it any less unsettling. I also have not specifically advocated anything, although it's probably clear that I have reservations.
That really depends on how you define "cloning". It absolutely can be considered therapeutic cloning, and it would serve as an initial step in reproductive cloning.
