This is No Clone! They are Different!

You could, using cloning, create a genetic clone of a child that you lost in a car accident or something, but chances are that the new child would not be the same. Almost undoubtedly, parents will expect someone that looks like their child and is genetically the same as their dead child to act the same as their dead child. Though nature determines much of what any particular human is like, another significant part is the circumstance and upbringing. There is absolutely no way to raise the child in the exact same way. The world is different, and the parents are different, therefore the child, even if genetically the same, would be different. There is also research which suggests that hormone washes help to determine the gender of a child, so it could be that you genetically clone a male child, and receive a biological male child with a female gender. Addition there are the worries of cloning a child but having a mutation when the genes are multiplying; the clone a perfectly healthy child with no abnormalities could end up having a deleted, duplicated, or inverted chromosome 15 which would give them autism.

It would also be unhealthy for the parents and the child for the parents to pretend that this clone was to serve to replace their dead child. I can certainly see parents doing this; I can see parents forcing the clone to wear the same clothes, like the same food, sleep in the same bed, and so on, of the dead child.

Waste of Our Time

While I do not think that cloning is particularly unethical provided that the process to producing humans does not involve harming sentient beings, I do think that cloning is simply a waste of time. The benefits of cloning an actual human are pathetic in comparison to other technological and more practical advancements. For instance, growing babies in large tubes or vats instead of inside of the womb would have a substantial effect on a natural biological humans. It would allow for increased brain size and thereby increased brain capacity. This is something that we should look into instead of looking into instead of cloning. Additionally, stem cell research would be a much wiser investment of time and resources; since it perpetuates good genes and can artificially filter out the bad ones. These sorts of projects would work much better to improve the human condition. Cloning is pale in comparison to other things that we are capable of. As such, I don't think that we should waste our time with cloning after we figure out how to clone meat (for ethical reasons mentioned in the previous post).

Cloned Meat

Would the technology used to clone children have any worthwhile benefits other than cloning?

I think so, yes. Actually, I think this technology could come along much sooner than the technology for cloning living things. In fact, it's starting to come into existence now. I think that the technology for cloned meat, when we perfect it, will be a substantial benefit to the world. It will many of the problems with meat-eating. Eating meat would become more ethical, since no animals get harmed in the process. The environmental effects would not be as significant since it does not take 12 pounds of grain to produce one pound of cloned meat; additionally, the cows would not produce as much methane. Cloning technology is certainly good for something, luckily for us this technology will probably soon be sufficient to produce meat.

As an interesting note, generally humans find that the closer the animal's physiology is to human physiology, the better the meat tastes. As such, if we could clone human flesh (no different from other animal flesh and it would be ethically obtained) meat-eating could eat it and it would presumably  taste better than many other kinds of meats. Many people would probably find this creepy, but I'm sure some people would develop a taste for it.

Advantages of Cloning?

What advantages would cloning have over regular reproduction and vice versa?

The first, as usually obvious advantage of cloning over regular reproduction is that you can perpetuate good genes. If the parent has no bad genes, no bad genes will carry over to the clone. The obvious disadvantage of this is the opposite problem; if the parent has a bad gene, the bad gene would be passed on to clone. Cloning, reduces genetic variance, which is, all in all, a very bad thing; if a single disease or illness infects one person with a bad gene, it will likely effect many more because this bad gene exists in many people. Cloning also may interfere with natural evolution, given that we are not working to eliminate bad genes, and are decreasing genetic variance. I do not think that this is particularly a problem for humans because I think we have the ability to be the end of natural evolution. I do, however, think that this would be a problem if we decided to clone non-animals. We should certainly allow non-human animals to continue to evolve through evolution.