ABSTRACT
ART (assisted reproductive technology) can offer no antidote to the unwelcome spectre of mortality, because it occasions a great deal more death than life, the number of jettisoned embryos and failed implantations being many times greater than the number of live births. Nowhere in this book is it suggested that acceptors who believe that ART will help them cheat the finality of death should be helped to emerge from their delusional state rather than subjected to the miseries of the infertility treatment cycle. From a tacit acceptance of the desire to overcome mortality as rational it is but a short step to accepting reproductive cloning as offering a genuine answer to the problem of mortality which, in global rather than egocentric terms, is no problem at all. Refusal to die is also a refusal to give birth, for the finite space of the planet is already desperately overcrowded, principally because of the failure of the death rate to keep pace with the birth rate. In the future our beleaguered planet may be run by an elite of cloned immortals who will be indifferent to the sufferings of the poor who will continue to be born and die in the old-fashioned way, inter faecem et urinam, in the pestilential slums that daily spread over more and more of Africa and South America.
