Infertility. Biblical narratives would have us know that it was considered a curse brought upon a household through a hapless woman. They use the utterly unforgiving word, "barren," which evokes shame both to man and God.

For whatever reason, theological or otherwise, infertility can bring some degree of shame or, at the very least, incompleteness for both man and woman, since it afflicts both sexes.

Thus, like all physical afflictions, it is never wrong to look for a cure.

Yet, current methods of assisted reproduction are highly inefficient. Thus, we must look towards a new techique now being researched albeit with opposition that generally barks up the wrong tree.

This technique is called reproductive cloning or somatic nuclear transfer, which was how Dolly was cloned. Cloning technology offers infertile couples the promise of greatly improving the odds of having a baby.

An infertile man can have sperm cloned and the undamaged sperm used. Likewise, an infertile woman can have an egg cloned and the fertile egg used for conception. In extreme cases a person can be cloned so a sibling is conceived.

Regardless of ethical debates about human cloning (there are various essays in this site that intelligently discuss this) it must be a choice offered to infertile parents. Like a truly democratic nation such as ours, this choice must be protected and upheld.