With all the fuss about human cloning, I was pretty sure I’d find a good selection of books of essays on the topic. I could only find one: this post-Dolly volume from 1999. It turns out to be very good: very difficult to say no to a book whose cover promises “essays from experts ranging from Stephen Jay Gould to Andrea Dworkin”. There are dozens of good pieces here but I’ll quote Dworkin because, remarkably, she manages to collapse human cloning into the same narrative of despair she’s been selling for decades:
“And so I think the men who will clone the compliant women will control them both reproductively and sexually; and, in the process, they will destroy all human meaning: the men will abandon change for absolute control, any chance of intimacy for absolute power. Through cloning, especially, men will defeat death; and change, too, will die. Life will be power without love or freedom or grace.”
Clones and clones: facts and fantasies about human cloning, Martha C. Nussbaum, Cass R. Sunstein eds.