I'm afraid too few Americans understand the true gravity of our current 'confusion'. When men like Orrin Hatch are pushing for therapeutic cloning on the grounds that they don't believe any life conceived outside of a human host is an individual human, congressional actions are 'fallen onto perilous times'. We are not far from technology providing the artificial means to gestate conceived embryos, without ever residing inside a human host. What will that tell us about the Hatchling position to allow full cloning exploitation, when it leads inexorably to conceiving supporting and harvesting individual human lives for their useful tissue matched body parts, and the designer individuals have never been placed inside a human host? If an acquiesence now can lead to such horror, the action now must be an incorrect direction to take, the real slippery slope commenced.
Hatch is wrong, patently and biologically wrong. The point of error is the discernment of differentiation between organ and organism. Now is the time to raise the din, to 'edumacate' our fellow Americans, before it is too late to turn back from the abyss of cannibalistic survival. If our nation faced a slippery slope over the advent of in vitro fertilization--and we failed to reject that first step--then we truly face a precipice with the possible approval of therapeutic cannibalism.