Good points ... and the law is the original reason for this thread. We are about to have a national deabte over banning human cloning at this time. As offered in the essay starting this thread, therapeutic cloning is cannibalism of individual human lives conceived for the purpose of harvesting their body parts. In order to have a truthful debate, some parameters must be hammered out. Jennyp offered the notion of form and function as the hallmark definitions for the different ages along the timeline/continuum of individual human life. Others have added the age they would consider relevant for defining 'worthy of legal protection'. Abortion enters the issues when/if cloned embryos are conceived and implanted, then killed and harvested for their body parts.
I offer that termination from a woman's life supporting body need not be the only application of the term abortion, for the support offered to cloned, alive, developing individual humans, though outside a human body, is life support, therefore to consciously remove life support (especially for an individual human life purposely conceived in vitro) is to abort an already existing individual life.
What is sad about the whole debate is that people engaged in it don't even seem to know what it means to be human. A mushroom is a "life". A human fibroblast is a "human life". My dog feels pain and pleasure. My cactus ages.
The fact is that most people are almost completely clueless about how to articulate the concept of rights. They know, more or less, how to behave among people, and sometimes why, and yet they attribute rights to the mere label of a species rather than understanding what it is about that species that gives meaning to the word "rights".