The freedom to pursue knowledge is distinguishable from the right to choose the method for achieving that knowledge, since the method itself may permissibly be regulated.387 Although the government may not prohibit research in an attempt to prevent the development of new knowledge, it may restrict or prohibit the means used by researchers which intrude on interests in which the state has a legitimate concern.388 Therefore, both the federal government and the states may regulate the researcher’s methods in order to protect the rights of research subjects and community safety.389 Research may be restricted, for example, to protect the subject’s right to autonomy and welfare by requiring informed, free, and competent consent.390 This is in keeping with other permissible restrictions under the First Amendment. In cases where “speech” and “nonspeech” elements are inextricably bound up in the conduct, “a sufficiently important governmental interest in regulating the nonspeech element can justify incidental limitations on First Amendment freedoms.”391 Thus, where the government can prove that restrictions on cloning and cloning technology are sufficiently important to the general well-being of individuals or society, such restrictions are likely to be upheld as legitimate, constitutional governmental actions, even if scientists were held to have a First Amendment right of scientific inquiry.392
THE RIGHT TO MAKE REPRODUCTIVE DECISIONS The right to make decisions about whether or not to bear children is constitutionally protected under the constitutional right to privacy393 and the constitutional right to liberty.394 The U.S. Supreme Court in 1992 reaffirmed the “recognized protection accorded to liberty relating to intimate relationships, the family, and decisions about whether to bear and beget a child.”395 Early decisions protected married couples’right to privacy to make procreative decisions, but later decisions focused on individuals’rights as well. The U.S. Supreme Court, in Eisenstadt v. Baird,396 stated, “[i]f the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.”397 A federal district court has indicated that the right to make procreative decisions encompasses the right of an infertile couple to undergo medically-assisted reproduction, including in vitro fertilization and the use of a donated embryo.398 Lifchez v. Hartigan399 held that a ban on research on conceptuses was unconstitutional because it impermissibly infringed upon a woman’s fundamental right to privacy. Although the Illinois statute banning embryo and fetal research at issue in the case permitted in vitro fertilization, it did not allow embryo donation, embryo freezing, or experimental prenatal diagnostic procedures. The court stated: It takes no great leap of logic to see that within the cluster of constitutionally protected choices that includes the right to have access to contraceptives, there must be included within that cluster the right to submit to a medical procedure that may bring about, rather than prevent, pregnancy. Chorionic villi sampling is similarly protected. The cluster of constitutional choices that includes the right to F-37