Cal Thomas has a profoundly confused and incoherent column in today’s Washington Times about the evils of cloning. You see, we have clones today because the Supreme ruled the wrong way thirty years ago about abortion. If Roe v. Wade had gone the other way, there would be no cloning research, nor any desire for it.

Right.

He does make one point with which I agree somewhat..

…the population-growth fanatics don’t mind when science kills, but they oppose anything that would add to our numbers. “We are more inclined to support science when it stops births than when it enables them,” he said.

This was a cite from another columnist. I don’t quite understand his point here, though. He seems to agree with them on the cloning issue, but not on the abortion issue.

He trots out the nonsensical myths about clone armies, and writes:

Clone wars might remove any sense of morality or immorality about war since those who are killing, or being killed, would be the fruits of soulless technology and of no greater value (but less expense) than an airplane or tank.

This is ignorant unsubstantiated nonsense. Clones are no more the “fruits of soulless technology” than was Louise Brown, the first “test-tube baby.” A quarter century on, her soul would seem to be as real, or not, as anyone else’s, and no rational person questions her humanity. What would be different about a clone, other than the fact that the genes were predetermined, rather than a random mix of two individuals’? Personhood is not conferred by the method of egg fertilization, and if souls exist, a clone has just as much of one as the younger of a set of identical twins.

At the end he despairs.

After 40 million (and counting) aborted babies in the United States, who, or what, is going to stop cloning? And on what grounds?

Who indeed? And on what grounds, indeed? Certainly none offered up in this editorial.