In its 2002 report on human cloning, the President's Council on Bioethics emphasized a second objection to human reproductive cloning. This objection holds that children who are “begotten” (i.e., conceived through sexual reproduction) are gifts from God; as such, they stand as the equal of their parents in dignity and humanity. By contrast, cloning is a human project that treats children as manmade products designed to genetic order. This project violates human dignity.

Like the argument that cloning offends God, this second objection also finds its roots in religious values. The National Bioethics Advisory Commission noted that “[a]ppeals to human dignity are prominent in Roman Catholic analyses and assessments of the prospects of human cloning, which base ‘human dignity’ on the creation story and on the Christian account of God's redemption of human beings. The Catholic moral tradition views the cloning of a human being as ‘a violation of human dignity.’”

A trendier secular version of this same objection asserts that parents would, in effect, have to buy their cloned children by paying money to egg donors, doctors, and laboratories. Society could come to regard children as products traded on the market. Ultimately, cloning would result in the “commodification” not only of children born through the technology, but all children. As Professor Ashutosh Bhaghwat has pointed out, this objection can be interpreted as a moral argument against applying the norms of the marketplace in the context of family relationships.