Antimiscegenation laws were bad public policy. Their costs outweighed their putative benefits.

The laws injured the men and women who were denied the fundamental right of marriage. The laws also injured the children of mixed-race couples by subjecting them to existential segregation and stigmatizing them as inferior. In addition, the laws denied mixed-race children legitimacy and the legal and social benefits of that status.

The legislatures that enacted antimiscegenation laws, and the courts that upheld them, disregarded these costs in favor of flimsy and speculative “evidence” regarding the supposed degeneracy and inferiority of mixed-race unions and children. This evidence included scientific studies purporting to establish that blacks are physically and mentally inferior to whites and that racial mixing leads to children who are inferior.

Today, most people recognize and acknowledge that antimiscegenation laws were bad public policy. Unfortunately, they have not recognized or acknowledged that laws against human reproductive cloning are bad public policy. Policymakers and lawmakers have emphasized the putative benefits of these laws and minimized or ignored their costs.

In this chapter, I seek to reverse this trend and provide a fresh public policy analysis of laws against human reproductive cloning. The chapter first identifies the costs that such laws impose – not only upon existing adults but also upon the innocent children who will be born through cloning technology.

Unfortunately, policymakers and lawmakers have virtually ignored the costs that anticloning laws will impose on human clones.