Compulsory Feticide

One of the standard cliches of the pro-“choice” movement is that they're not forcing people to get abortions. A recent New Jersey law will do just that. According to Wesley J. Smith:

The key to understanding the radical depth and scope of A-2840 is in the bill's definition of the term "human being":

As used in this section, "cloning a human being," means the replication of a human individual by cultivating a cell with genetic material [the SCNT cloning process] through the egg, embryo, fetal and newborn stages into a new human individual. (my emphasis)

Read this sentence carefully. Its terms would make it legal in New Jersey to create a human cloned embryo, implant it in a willing woman's womb, gestate it through the ninth month, and only require that the cloned fetus be killed before it becomes a "new human individual," e.g., at the very point of birth. This means that law would expressly permit implantation and gestation for any amount of time before the cloned fetus becomes a "new human individual"!

In other words, if an embryo is cloned and the people responsible change their minds about the permissibility of abortion, they are commanded to abort it anyway.

I'm reminded of “A Delicate Adjustment” by Elizabeth Moon in which a childless couple tries to hijack an implantable embryo from a laboratory.

One last note, this is partly due to the pro-life tactic of trying to use prejudices against reproductive cloning to ban embryo research. It backfired.