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To: epicure who wrote (281)	2/23/2001 6:53:16 PM
From: one_less	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 51721

"A clone would be unlikely to have any disabilities. Just one little thing to think about." Actually I have followed the state of care for children with disabilities for many years. I have to disagree that they are more likely to be abused. In fact I would say they are more likely to be spoiled (admittedly that may be a form of abuse). What are you basing your statement about clones being unlikely to have any disabilities. The only ones that would br reduced would be the genetically inherited ones (which are actually a small percentage).

To: epicure who wrote (281)	2/23/2001 8:21:45 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 51721

A clone would be unlikely to have any disabilities According to nytimes.com , this is far from clear. Nearly all of the animal cloning efforts, however, have led to high rates of fetal and neonatal mortality in the resulting offspring. Those who compare cloning to current I.V.F. techniques -- arguing that lots of those fail, too -- neglect to mention that I.V.F. failures consist mostly of unsuccessful implantations, not the sudden deaths of young babies. "All sorts of things go wrong," said George Seidel, a cloning researcher at Colorado State University. Cloned cattle and sheep are often born dangerously large. "Normally you might expect a 100-pound birthweight in a calf, but with a clone, you might get 160 pounds," said Seidel. Because such outsize calves don't have room to wriggle around in the uterus, they can be born lame or with limb deformities. "Sometimes the kidneys aren't right, they're just plain put together wrong -- or the heart is, or the lungs, or the immune system," he added. "It can be a unique abnormality in each case. They can die within a few days after birth, or sometimes they just can't make it after you cut the umbilical cord." Nobody really knows why. Only if such problems are surmounted, said Seidel, would experimenting with human cloning be ethical: "We shouldn't be deliberately producing babies with abnormalities. We're talking about an abnormality rate of maybe 30 percent in cloned animals. In human babies, the normal rate of congenital defects is about 2 percent, and we wouldn't tolerate a jump to 3 percent." Indeed, virtually all of the scientists who have tried to clone other mammals say that we don't know enough at this point to try it in humans, and that to do so would amount to hugely risky experimentation on prospective people. Citing such safety concerns (as well as the possible psychological impact on children), the ethics committee of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine issued a report in November saying that cloning as a treatment for infertility did not currently meet "standards of ethical acceptability."