Grieving mother argues for right to 'offspring' without restriction

The offer of a chance to bring back a loved one could appeal to an especially motivated, distraught and vulnerable subset of potential clients, people like Kathy Gordon, whose tireless efforts to have her dead daughter cloned testify to the lengths to which some will go to heal a broken heart.

Gordon's eldest daughter, Emily, was 16 years old in 1997, when the news about Dolly the sheep came out. At the time, Gordon said, Emily spoke enthusiastically about the prospect of human cloning. Six months later she was killed by a drunken driver.

Devastated by the sudden loss, Gordon became obsessed with the idea of cloning a girl from some of Emily's cells. She spoke to the coroner soon after the accident and tried to have some tissues frozen in liquid nitrogen, but to no avail. She contacted many of the top scientists in the world of cloning, but those who replied, she said, simply "offered condolences." The few tubes of Emily's blood that remain today have been stored in refrigerators not cold enough to ensure proper preservation of her cells for cloning. But Gordon still harbors some hope that the technology will improve, allowing their use someday.

"I don't understand people who want to clone themselves," says Gordon, 42, a lab technician who lives in central Montana and has a doctorate in ethics. But cloning one's dead daughter is different, she said. "I'd trade everything I have today just to have Emily back."

Gordon rejects the idea that she would try to mold her new child into some preconceived persona. Don't all parents struggle with the dueling urges to shape a child and let that child become her own person? It's a struggle, Gordon said, that she'd be having with Emily if not for the accident that took her away.

And besides, she asked, since when does the government engage in the business of distinguishing between good and bad reasons for having a child? Surely, Gordon said, her freedom to reproduce is at least as compelling as a clone's right to be unique.

She has some case law on her side. The Supreme Court has recognized that "procreation" and the right to "have offspring" are fundamental rights, which means the government cannot restrict them without overwhelmingly good reason. "If the right of privacy means anything," the court said 30 years ago in Eisenstadt v. Baird, "it is the right of the individual ... to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child." Other cases offer similar language.

Of course, even cloning won't bring Gordon's daughter back. Gordon realizes that cloning replicates nature, not nurture. But that's part of her inspiration.

Emily grew up in difficult circumstances during Gordon's previous marriage, she said, declining to go into details. "But in the end, she turned out wonderfully."

"If I could have a child with her predisposition to life, her humor, but have her grow up in this new life I've created for myself, which is much better now. I'm married to an attorney. I have all kinds of things now ... " Her voice trailed off.