"Well, is it? Look at the poor thing's life. Bam, you've got the start of life and she grows and she grows and then when people are developing and seeing the world around them, she has nothing, and she grows, and it's still nothing, and then she grows too fast, and it's more nothing, and then... she is what she is. It doesn't matter to anyone that she never had a chance. It doesn't matter to anyone that she was grown in a way that deprived her of a real life, of thinking and feeling and deciding who she is. We call something damage when there was something there to get damaged in the first place, but how's it not cruel to deny someone the chance to grow and develop in the first place to use their body? Maybe that shouldn't be punished, sure, if it happened off-ship--but why should that be rewarded?"
"The law should be tempered by compassion, and the compassionate thing here is to decide what's best for the clone, if not out of respect of what she is, than out of respect for what she should have been. I don't know what's right for her, but I do know that she deserves to have the least amount of suffering possible. She deserves the dignity that was never afforded her. If you all decide she should be pulled off the life support or something, I can't even argue that--as long as people aren't allowed to peck away at her organs like vultures, 'cause that's not dignity. That's letting what should have been a person be treated like a thing."
Kon took one last deep breath.
"Because in the end, clones are always created for a purpose. It's our nature. We are treated like we're not people, and that we're property, that our organs or other parts of ourselves belong to other people. We're told we're not individuals or that we're soul-less or that we're not thinking for ourselves, only programmed. I'm luckier than some because my purpose needed higher thinking skills and allowed me some freedom--and because the person I was cloned from looked after me and was my friend from the start--"
He looked at Superman gratefully.
"--but most clones are lucky if they can even think above the third-grade level and don't have an extra arm coming out of their crotch. Hell, most are lucky if they even survive the cloning process itself, or can think after it, something, unfortunately, that Mei Xing's clone is a casualty of."
He added bluntly, "And it sucks. To be used. To be treated like a thing. To be made to be used."
"Please. Please make that different here. Taking away Mei-Xing's clone to do what's best for it, whatever that is, isn't punishment when the organs can be replaced by Stacy--and even stockpiled, it's just respecting life, and preventing an insidious practice from having the tiniest bit of leeway from edging into our legal system. Because you can't say it's okay to use a clone because they're not sentient and also say it's not okay to make an unsentient clone to be used, not with any legitimacy. Using life that was created to be used and creating life to be used are intertwined. It's not possible to separate the two."
no subject
"Well, is it? Look at the poor thing's life. Bam, you've got the start of life and she grows and she grows and then when people are developing and seeing the world around them, she has nothing, and she grows, and it's still nothing, and then she grows too fast, and it's more nothing, and then... she is what she is. It doesn't matter to anyone that she never had a chance. It doesn't matter to anyone that she was grown in a way that deprived her of a real life, of thinking and feeling and deciding who she is. We call something damage when there was something there to get damaged in the first place, but how's it not cruel to deny someone the chance to grow and develop in the first place to use their body? Maybe that shouldn't be punished, sure, if it happened off-ship--but why should that be rewarded?"
"The law should be tempered by compassion, and the compassionate thing here is to decide what's best for the clone, if not out of respect of what she is, than out of respect for what she should have been. I don't know what's right for her, but I do know that she deserves to have the least amount of suffering possible. She deserves the dignity that was never afforded her. If you all decide she should be pulled off the life support or something, I can't even argue that--as long as people aren't allowed to peck away at her organs like vultures, 'cause that's not dignity. That's letting what should have been a person be treated like a thing."
Kon took one last deep breath.
"Because in the end, clones are always created for a purpose. It's our nature. We are treated like we're not people, and that we're property, that our organs or other parts of ourselves belong to other people. We're told we're not individuals or that we're soul-less or that we're not thinking for ourselves, only programmed. I'm luckier than some because my purpose needed higher thinking skills and allowed me some freedom--and because the person I was cloned from looked after me and was my friend from the start--"
He looked at Superman gratefully.
"--but most clones are lucky if they can even think above the third-grade level and don't have an extra arm coming out of their crotch. Hell, most are lucky if they even survive the cloning process itself, or can think after it, something, unfortunately, that Mei Xing's clone is a casualty of."
He added bluntly, "And it sucks. To be used. To be treated like a thing. To be made to be used."
"Please. Please make that different here. Taking away Mei-Xing's clone to do what's best for it, whatever that is, isn't punishment when the organs can be replaced by Stacy--and even stockpiled, it's just respecting life, and preventing an insidious practice from having the tiniest bit of leeway from edging into our legal system. Because you can't say it's okay to use a clone because they're not sentient and also say it's not okay to make an unsentient clone to be used, not with any legitimacy. Using life that was created to be used and creating life to be used are intertwined. It's not possible to separate the two."
Kon swallowed.
"And that's all I have to say."