Cloning sounds a hell of a lot more expensive than fucking. And even if you forget the difficulty of reliably cloning a species as complex as a human, there’s the old nature v. nurture thing.
I can see a market with parents wanting a child who would be the clone of some celebrity, or the clone of someone with desirable characteristics, or the clone of their first child who died tragically, and of course, a clone of themselves.
Yes, all those things could happen when human cloning becomes as routine as IVF today. But none of those things poses any particular ethical problems that aren’t already handled by our currently laws.
Do you want a cloned Michael Jordan baby? Thing is, you can’t demand Michael Jordan hand over a tissue sample. You’d have to get his permission, just like you have to get his permission to create a child using his sperm.
And that baby clone of Michael Jordan is a human being, and we already have laws against child abuse. That kid might have incredible natural aptitude for basketball, but the thing is, lots of kids have incredible natural aptitude for sports. And the difference between Michael Jordan and those kids is that Michael Jordan was famously relentlessly focused on improvement. If your Michael Jordan Jr wants to goof off and play video games instead of practice basketball obsessively, what are you going to do about it? Yeah, we’re all familiar with the stage mom or sports dad who pushes and pushes their child in a pursuit. That only goes so far. We’ve all heard stories of talented kids who were pushed to perform, who when the turned 18 put down their equipment and never picked it up again because they hated it. Being the star performer was their parent’s dream, not their dream.
Anyway, I suspect that the intersection of people who want to raise a cloned baby of some famous person, and the famous people who want to provide tissue samples to create those babies will be very small.