"Sex Education" in Beaker's Dozen (1998)
By Nancy Kress
Young girl discovers she has been cloned when one of the clones goes "awry."
Molly cannot understand why her parents bring strangers to their house to observe and question her, nor can she understand her mother’s muddled explanation of how children are conceived. Only when she is approached by hordes of reporters does she learn that she was cloned at the embryonic stage, and that her clones have been marketed to prospective parents based on her academic and social achievements. When she realizes that the media attention stems from a lawsuit brought against her parents by a disgruntled couple, Molly sets out to love the unwanted child who is really a part of herself. She begins to feel that any damage the child may have is actually her fault, since the child was made from her genetic material.
Rather than focus on the method of creating the cloned children, Kress highlights the family dynamics that shift and ultimately collapse under the burden of this decision. While her parents have sold the clones in order to finance Molly’s future college tuition, they ultimately usurp Molly’s control over her own body. Molly feels in some ways diminished by the knowledge that other “Molly”s are wandering around. At ten-years-old, she is incapable of fully understanding the significance of the cloning process, an inability that shatters her faith in her parents. Molly’s situation indicates that one cloning issue that must be addressed is one of consent: should genetic material be available for cloning without the donors’ approval?
Evaluation: Kress’s short stories present genetics in an accessible and humanizing way, forcing her readers to address their personal stakes in advances in technological advancements and applications. Because her characters and settings seem real, the potential futures Kress posits seem all too plausible.
– Natalie Champ