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It’s a theologically debatable question whether embryos have souls. Some religious traditions maintain that a soul does not even enter a human body until the baby takes its first breath.

This is an ultimately irrelevant point, since the consequences of human cloning reach far beyond the embryonic stage. No one has the right to torture another living being. And that is exactly what you will do if you attempt to clone a human with current cloning technology. In the attempt to gestate a single clone successfully through to full term, for example, many fetuses will malform in utero and will probably be aborted - many at stages of development when they can experience pain.

Those deformed babies who are not aborted will most likely live shortened, incomplete lives in various forms of pain and anguish. To support allowing someone to perpetrate such a selfish, cruel act in the name of their "reproductive rights" is barbarism.

BearArms wrote: "No one has the right to torture another living being. And that is exactly what you will do if you attempt to clone a human with current cloning technology."

Your statement is out-of-context from standard medical practices, in which new techniques are perfected by experimenting on animals before trying them on human beings.

Now I'll get all the howls from the animal-rights activists.

The last two sentences of my article were:

I’m not saying introducing a fundamental new way of having babies should be green-lighted. But can’t a free society agree to an amber light and proceed with caution?

Didn't anybody read that far?