After Market.

On the way home I got to thinking about a concept for a sci-fi novel or movie. The premise is that it's an alternate timeline, and a bill was passed in the 1990's that allowed for cloning of humans, with certain limitations. These limitations were that cloning had to occur at the embryonic state and only one of the clones was allowed to gestate to full maturity. The other had to be removed from the uterus and used for study.

Obviously this outraged thousands of anti-abortion activists and protests turned into riots and Canada and the United States (the two countries that passed the bill) were in turmoil. Seeking to find a balance, politicians agreed that the bill needed amending, making it so that only families who had their embryo inspected for genetic defects would be allowed to clone their child. The goal was that while one of the children would be born with potential defects (like Downs Syndrome, dwarfism, etc.) the other would embryo would be removed, undergo genetic restructuring and then reinserted into the womb. Thus parents would be given twins, one with the birth defect and the other normal. While this served to appease many of the abortion activists, it still didn't sit well with society on the whole. Issues where parents would blatantly love one child more than the other began to spring up. The challenged children would often be subject to abuse and neglect. A few decades later the bill was amended again. Once again anyone was available to have their embryo cloned, as before, but they were allowed to "harvest" one of the embryos and have it grow in a lab. If the embryo was a clone of a child with a defect, the defective embryo would be aborted and the restructured, healthy embryo would be reinserted into the womb. The excuse is that the soul of the child was preserved in the new embryo.

In the future the practice of cloning embryos came to be a luxury of the super rich who would clone a healthy embryo, but keep the clone in a sort of stasis. It would grow, but would never be awoken and in the event their child became ill, or had severe internal injuries they would "harvest" the clone's organs for replacement.

Wait a minute. I think I just wrote the plot for The Island. Goddammit.