Sex vs Cloning

Sexual reproduction is a staple of the human condition. It's an amazing solution to many of life's problems, the cause for even more, and sometimes just something to do depending on the people you ask. It's the way to spread STDs, including Herpes, HIV, and Pregnancy. This last one is sometimes useful, but far more often a 9 month punishment for both parties involved (or perhaps just one, if the father was a scumbag or dies).

For those who seek pregnancy, perhaps cloning is a better alternative. You know almost exactly what the child will be like straight from the bat, and while playing with genetics, you can custom engineer your child to be everything you want. A left-handed, orange-eyed, flat-footed boy with a large frame? Clone the author and tweak the brown down from his eyes, there you have it!

Should cloning ever become fully accepted by society, it would not replace sexual reproduction. It is significantly more fun, and there's an air of mystery about what the child will be. You can never tell if the child will come out healthy, or in some cases, who the father will be. There's the widely romanticized aspect of it. Valentine's Day was completely built around it, and Halloween is rapidly moving closer to a second glory day for sex too.

That said, cloning takes away the excitement in exchange for reliability. You know EXACTLY what the child will come out as, and that it will be healthy (as long as you get it from a legal practitioner. Those back-alley cloning devices have a long history of mutations. Extra thumbs and webbed feet, the works). This isn't to say that romantic images of a man, a woman, and a geneticist can't exist, or that they shouldn't. This is only saying that the world has not yet taken it's first step towards complete asexuality. Some have embraced it, good friends of mine identify with no popular sexuality, and just love everyone without a thought of genitals. Many will fear it, I'm sure Westboro Baptist Church will protest it, like they do soldiers' funerals. Regardless of one's stance, it will provide an interesting alternative.

This in mind, it must be stated how well this will boost our economy, especially in the event of universal health care. The sales on latex, lambskin, petroleum jellies, and a number of other related objects will skyrocket while pregnancy tests, chloroform, and abortions will drop dramatically. Trojan stocks will replace Microsoft, Coca-Cola, and GameStop (this time of year) as the shares to own.

Really, the short end of the stick comes to the poor GYNOs who lose out on the price of birth and pregnancy, unless they are able to adapt to the changing world. All dates will be predetermined, and all expecting parents will be ready sooner.

Licenses would be required to get a baby implanted, and more importantly, renewed to keep the child. Actually, this should already exist, as it would reduce the costs of welfare, housing, and most other issues relating to the lack of population control.

Did I believe in the devout ways of the religion I was converted to for vanity's sake at the age of 7, I'd be more old fashioned in my methods. No matter what pro-cloning advocates will push for, I'll stay steadfast in the old ways. It's okay for a baby to happen without implanting a hand-grown fetus of myself, even if the world will miss out on twice the greatness over a longer period of time. It's fine to run the risk of a child coming out with heart defects, blindness, and severe autism if it means that I can keep those damned scientists from thriving and killing religion.

...or, perhaps, it's just because religious nuts love sex. Ask the clergy.

I'm not saying cloning is a viable option, or a realistic one. I'm saying that something must be done to fix these problems. Two of myself would think much more abundantly than just one, I see no way that we couldn't solve our issues this way.