No argument this time, just a serious question. If cloning is to be banned, that presumably means there will be criminal penalties for creating clones. Who, exactly, should be vulnerable for those penalties? If a couple X and Y decide they want a cloned baby (say with Y’s DNA inserted into one of X’s eggs), and Dr. Z assists with this so clone baby A is born of X, who should be punished for this act of illegal cloning? X? Y? Z? A? (Well, presumably not A.) Any others?

I think many people who want to ban cloning have in mind punishing Z, but I can’t tell from most discussions just exactly what their position comes to. The Weldon-Stupak bill that passed the House doesn’t distinguish, and seems to leave at least X and Z liable, and possibly Y as well. The British Human Reproductive Cloning Act only says Z would be liable, but in debate in the House of Lords Lord Hunt said that the birth mother may also be liable “under the general rules of criminal law if she is an active and knowing participant.” And obviously neither Bill settles the moral question of who should be liable, assuming, as I do not, that there should be a ban. (I think in this case punishing X but not Y seems rather absurd, but maybe Y would also be liable as an active and knowing participant.)

In part I want to figure this out so I can get the opposition picture right. As people have noted, I’ve been fairly cavalier in my representation of opposing views in earlier postings. (Normally I’m fairly easy-going about these things, but I’m actually a little embarrassed about some of the mistakes in the last post, even by blogging standards it was pretty bad in places, so I want to get things better in the future.) And in part it’s so I can have a go at dramatising the difference between pro- and anti-cloning forces. The image of Feds storming into the maternity ward to arrest X and Y, as repugnant an image as I can imagine in this whole situation, seems to make vivid some of the libertarian concerns I have with the anti-cloning movement. But if X and Y would be left to raise baby A, and only Z, the handmaiden, was taken off to jail, then obviously we can’t use just that image.

(I know that even if X and Y were thought to be criminally liable here there might be a humanitarian reason for not arresting them at the, like, ‘scene of the crime’. But it might be thought better to arrest them before A forms any emotional attachments, so maybe the Feds would choose just this moment to storm in.)