Attack Of The Clones

I'm reading the book America Alone by Mark Steyn. It's a doomsday tome that so far is centered around the fact that the global birth rate is lower than that needed to sustain growth, and the birth rates in many European nations are low enough so that their populations will halve in the next generation. Spain, for example, has a birth rate of 1.1 children per woman - in other words, two parents have 1 child. Use round numbers like 100 parents produce 50 children, and you can see the issue. If those 50 have 25 children, in two generations the populace can't sustain itself economically. The second premise of the book (thus far) is that Islamic people are filling the voids in the population in Europe. Many countries are 40% Muslim already.

The demographics at play here may do more to alter our thinking about genetics than anything else. If people won't have children, or can't have children, why not produce clones? If the technology were there to produce healthy, viable, offspring that were indistinguishable from a normally conceived child, I can imagine that the people on waiting lists for adoption would take them in a heartbeat. The designer children would be, by design, disease resistant, athletically superior, predisposed to higher than average intelligence and essentially perfect in every way a parent could want.

Sure, the ethics of cloning come into question, but if a society was facing extinction, or at least the death of it's preferred way of life, I think the ethical debate would be short lived. People have done worse things in the name of preserving their way of life (the holocaust comes to mind), so why would this be so hard to believe?