Cloning

Charles Murtaugh posted yesterday on therapeutic cloning; he supports this, while opposing reproductive cloning (or as he puts them, "embryo cloning" and "baby cloning"). He does a good job of criticizing some of the rhetoric employed by those opposed to cloning, and acknowledges that this comes down to the personhood of the blastocyst.

This is an issue which Mr. Murtaugh and I briefly touched upon last spring. You can read my post at the time here. Later in the summer Mr. Murtaugh posted again, here; although I hadn't noticed that post, I think the post I just linked effectively answers Mr. Murtaugh's claims.

As I noted elsewhere last spring, Mr. Murtaugh is a very thoughtful blogger, yet I believe that on the question of the personhood of the human blastocyst, he is wrong, and this obviously impacts one's views on cloning of any sort.