Prior to the ability to manipulate pre-implantation individual human life, the issue would have only been the figment of someone's imagination to ask about the rights of a pre-quickened human. The fetal stages prior to eight or nine months from last mensis were likely observed by someone since miscarriages have been around as long as humans, I suppose. But just waht was discovered in the menstral flow of a miscarrying woman still escaped understanding without deeper scientific knowledge.
When the procedure of in vitro fertilization was being debated, decades ago, even then the deeper understandings of the human embryo were not well grasped ... DNA and chromosomal investigations were in their infancy.
Embryology now holds as axiomatic that an individual human lifetime begins at conception (though most embryologists wouldn't make so clear a statement as that; only a few embryologists have stated clearly this axiom, I can cite a couple if you're interested) and is surety of an individual life with first cell division because the organism is 'doing' its growth and development --a process that continues for a lifetime.
We've been loosely discussing this subject (continuum of individual life) with the notion of form and function as the determinates for the ages of the individual human life as it follows a continuum of its individual lifetime. Absent a new understanding agreed upon regarding the embryo's right to continue its lifetime, our scientists will do therapeutic cloning under the assumption that society accepts it. That process is cannibalism in modern form. Do we wish to tacitly accept this further degeneration of the human family? I don't, that's why I write these essays and get involved in these discussions.
Freepers are thinkers, not just actors on the political stage. The time to discuss issues involving the right to life for the embryo, whether cloned or conceived through in vitro fertilization with sex cells, is NOW (actually, it passed a crcuial time for discussion further back, but that's the stuff of another thread).
When the President put restrictions on government funding for stem cell research, he was at a distinct political disadvantage. The 'opposition' to his administration was seeking a way to trap him prior to our national awareness rising to a better understanding of the issues involved. I hope we may be able to prevent that disadvantage where cloning of individual human life is concerned. I hope we can raise American awareness of the true nature the scientists already understand, before the scientists accomplish our tacit acceptance of an horrific degeneracy in science for the human species, with deadly preying upon the smallest of our species to 'improve' the existence of the larger among us.
Okay, so a human life begins at conception (or whatever it is called with cloning). But my hope has been to try to get you to tie this in with rights. A cat's life begins at conception too. You say an "individual" human life means a human "organism". But cats are organisms as well. What is it that distinguishes humans from cats so that humans have rights but cats do not? If an alien landed on this planet and travelled amongst its creatures and rocks, how would he know which of them had rights?