*cough* Another hot chapter...
This is a fantastic story, the kind that really makes you think, so here's a few of my thoughts on cloning.
Feel free to skip to the next post since it's quite boring.
I personally don't have any problem with the idea of cloning humans as long as clones are granted full human/citizen rights and are not the property of their original. To me cloning has to be seen as an alternative way of reproduction (a lot of life forms on this very planet use cloning to reproduce). A couple wants a clone of one of them to raise as a child? Fine by me. A couple wants a clone of a deceased child? Fine by me too.
Like Parrish pointed out in her story, clones are only a copy of a body, their personalities will be different from the original. A clone of a deceased child will probably be as different from the original as a brother or a sister would. Of course Sci-Fi has offered the prospect that one day it may be possible to transfer the personality and the memory of an original to their clone. I'm not saying this will never be possible (in fact, i'm pretty sure it will) but right now we don't even have the beginning of a theory on how to achieve this. This situation will have to be dealt with by future generations and certainly not us. Clones are just humans born in a different way, nothing to be scared of, and certainly not a reason to consider them as sub-humans or non-humans. Clones ARE humans, nothing more, nothing less.
There is so much fantasy going on about clones, i remember that before animal cloning was a reality (yes, i'm that old), some people were thinking that clones from a same original would exhibit some kind of collective conscience. This assumption was based on the fact that they would share the exact same DNA and insects like ants or bees, which also share the same DNA inside a colony, seem to have a collective conscience, all individuals acting like parts of one entity, each one ready to die for the collective. The military were extremely interested by this possibility! Imagine an army of one million soldiers, all clones of the same original, acting with a collective conscience like one big entity, each soldier ready to die for the good of the collective. Unfortunately for the military, animals that have been cloned so far did not exhibit any sign of that collective conscience, mammals are not insects!
Finally, on the use of clones as body parts for organ transplants, i'll make this short. I don't have a problem with it as long as the clones are grown without brains and are therefore empty shells.