Time will tell if the year 2002 will go down in history books as the year the first human clone was born. That would be a shameful thing. But it would be an added shame if 2003 doesn't go down in history as the year the door was closed on legal cloning.

The company Clonaid has claimed that a human clone was born Dec. 26, but it has not produced the evidence to prove it. In the first week of January, company spokeswoman Brigitte Boisselier backed away from her post-Christmas statements promising independent verification that a baby girl had been cloned from its 31-year-old mother. She now says the child's mother fears that Florida authorities will take the baby from her and won't cooperate in DNA testing.

Clonaid was founded by the Raelian religious group, whose white-clad, medal-bearing founder teaches that all life on Earth is the product of cloning 25,000 years ago by a race of aliens from outer space.

The science of cloning is theoretically simple—and not illegal. In the procedure, the nucleus of an egg cell is removed, and the nucleus from an ordinary cell from another person or animal is put in its place and electrically charged. That's how Dolly the sheep was cloned in 1997.

In the United States, federal funding of human cloning was banned by executive order, for five years, just after the news of Dolly's cloning was announced. However, in the absence of state laws prohibiting cloning, human cloning without federal money may be legal.

Cloning supporters use tricky language that distinguishes between “reproductive” cloning, which produces a live baby, and “therapeutic” cloning, in which the baby, at its embryonic stage, is used for its tissue.

Both are immoral.

Catholics take issue with “reproductive” cloning for the same reason we take issue with in vitro fertilization: It produces human life outside the loving relationship of a man and a woman. Cloning simply adds a creepy element to this existing moral problem.

Wrong in itself, this sort of reproduction has dangerous consequences: The children it produces are more easily treated like property rather than being tied by human bonds to family relationships. Thus, embryos are killed thoughtlessly in the process, children are more easily abandoned by parents who feel no ownership of them and have drifted apart before the child is born, and any set of parents—a same-sex couple or a group of people—can “beget” children, endangering the child's future.

“Therapeutic” cloning is clearly immoral in that it creates a new, cloned person in order to use that person, without his or her consent, for experiments or to take cells or organs from that person in order to benefit a different person. To mine its resources, the cloned human being—boy or girl—must be killed.

Cloning backers use the terms “reproductive” and “therapeutic” to confuse the general public. Some legislators have promoted cloning “bans” that don't ban cloning at all—they ban the hair-raising “reproductive cloning” but not the arguably worse “therapeutic” cloning.

Other bills have sought to ban all cloning. It's this legislation that ought to be advanced in the next Congress.

We live in a country where, for instance, a 24-year-old Pennsylvania woman went to jail recently for failing to return overdue library books. Perhaps she should have: Society shows its disapproval of certain behaviors by meting out strong consequences.

A majority of Americans have said that cloning should be illegal. Common sense and morality agree. We should make it so and show we mean it by putting guilty scientists in jail, too.