More and more people are voicing their support for human cloning as a viable option for infertile and childless couples, reports the US-based Human Cloning Foundation (HCF).

"Human cloning must be a choice offered to infertile parents," said HCF spokesman David Madrigal. "In a truly democratic nation such as ours, this choice must be protected and upheld."

The HCF website, www.HumanCloning.org, accumulates comments from all over the world in support of human cloning. Many of the messages come from childless parents and single women who want to have a child of their own. Many parents have also written the HCF after losing a baby in a fire, car accident, or other unavoidable disaster. "These grief stricken parents often say that they would like to have their perfect baby back," says contributor Simon Smith. "Human cloning would allow such parents to have a twin of their lost baby, but it would be like other twins, a unique individual and not a carbon copy of the child that was lost under heartbreaking circumstances."

One female contributor decries the fact that other people seem indifferent to the plight of childless couples. "Adults, who would cringe at the idea of belittling people with mental illness or clinical depression, still seem indifferent to the pain endured by men and women who have a socially unrecognized disability: infertility."

"It's not that having children is better or worse than being childless, but that every individual has the right to make that choice for themselves. And when that choice is taken away from them for whatever reason, the individual experiences real pain," she said, while citing a study by the University of Nebraska that concluded that women who are involuntarily childless tend to exhibit more long-lasting symptoms of distress than other women.

The study said that women who had no biological or "social" children - social children meaning children incorporated into the family through adoption, step- or foster-children, showed more signs of psychological distress than those who had always conceived with ease.

The report concluded that the cause of the women's sadness came not from the infertility itself, but from "involuntary childlessness", because women who were childless by choice tended to show even fewer signs of distress than mothers who had no problems conceiving.

Contact: David@HumanCloning.org
Website: www.HumanCloning.org