Cloning as a solution to labor shortage?

Buh?? The limiting factor in population maintenance isn't the supply of gametes. If paid surrogacy and outsourced early childcare were palatable to enough people, it could already be done with quality donor sperm. People like Aella have spitballed scenarios like that and others have rightfully called it out of touch. Look at the state of elder care. Being handed off full-time to unrelated paid staff is bound to be an inferior substitute to a supportive home environment. And you think this arrangement should be extended to young children? Even weekday daylight-hour daycare gets flack for keeping kids apart from their mothers. Everything worth criticizing about daycares would be even worse in full-time orphanages for artificially created children with no real family units to come home to. Children naturally want a family unit, after all. They crave secure parental figures who they know are theirs, and it seems like no amount of social engineering can overwrite that. This became obvious in abandoned communal childrearing experiments, such as in the kibbutzim in Israel. The costs of surrogacy aren't trivial either. Currently, surrogacy agencies seek women who've already had at least one healthy pregnancy, so we're either depending on a continued supply of women who've already started families (the very supply that's declining) or newly encouraging nulliparous women to take the plunge for a baby they don't even get to keep, raised in an arrangement they have reason to be suspicious of. Basically, a family unit is what children need, non-negotiably, and adults are having fewer children where coupling is declining and couples don't feel equipped to keep kids funded and housed to an appropriate living standard. We surely need to change these conditions; I just don't think throwing other people's money at young adults to say "Now go have kids!" does that.