Cloning Why would someone be against human cloning? It doesn't involve anything fundamentally new. The idea of two people being genetically identical is nothing new because we've always had identical twins. The idea of having one parent is nothing new because we've always had single parent house holds. The only difference is that that is literally true. The idea of artificial human reproduction isn't new since we've had artificial insemination since the 1930's, and have had in vitro fertilization since 1972. Cloning itself isn't new since if you cut piece off of a plant, and bury it somewhere else, that's cloning. We've been doing that for tens of thousands of years. Cloning is artificially induced asexual reproduction. One type of asexual reproduction is budding. An example is when a planarian, or flatworm, divides in half. Cutting a planarian in half with a knife is artificially induced budding, and therefore cloning. Cutting a planarian in half isn't fundamentally different than separating Siamese twins. Therefore you could say that separating Siamese twins is human cloning. Oddly enough, people in the 19th Century would be less shocked by human cloning than we would be. Human cloning is when a child has only one parent. That seems very strange and shocking to us. This is because we think of kids being raised by their mother has having a dad that's out there somehow. He's a "deadbeat dad", and we have a system of child support, etc. To us, literally not having a dad at all, anywhere, is very shocking. To people in the 19th Century, if a child was raised by their mother, they would think of them has having no father. They thought of the father as not existing at all. The kid himself would say, "I ain't got no daddy". That's how everyone thought of it. To them, a child with only one parent would hardly be a radical concept at all.