REPLY RE CLONING: From Ananda Gupta. You can read it here. My reply follows:

Thanks for the reply. Two quick points about the legal penalties for abortion: 1) There’s a distinction between things that are immoral and things that should be made illegal (obviously). Some embryo-killing may be more amenable to criminalization than others. That shouldn’t change whether we believe that embryos shouldn’t be killed, whether embryos are individual human lives worthy of protection, etc.

I didn’t point out, though I should have, that one major reason pre-legalization abortion laws focused on the abortionist was so that women would go to the emergency room if something went wrong. They’d be less likely to do that if they’d face jail time, thus they would be more likely to die and the abortionists would be less likely to get caught. As for “keeping [women who abort] out of maximum security,” I doubt that’s where we would put, for example, a teen who left her baby in a trashcan. I may be wrong, but I’ve read reports on several of these cases. (You’re totally right that the “doesn’t look like a baby” thing shouldn’t be relevant, and I retract that claim.) So there’s all kinds of needs to balance when we’re talking about who would receive what penalty for an illegal abortion.

2) But I still don’t think any of that discussion is relevant to cloning, for the reasons I gave.

[And yeah, I apologized for getting his sex wrong.]