Two Nightmares, both of which pass at waking

Future Shock: William Saletan's five-part series (in 'Slate'), "The Organ Factory," has EarlyBird and Thrasymachus performing the crystal-ball waltz. First, EB here:

We will be soon be raising whole fetuses (don't worry, we'll have found a more comfortable euphemism by then) in artificial wombs like so many watermelons, for the harvesting of their organs. It will not horrify us to see rows of fetuses in glass jars with tubes feeding them fluids and nutrients. Culture critics will smartly point out how they look like the humans kept in suspended animation in "The Matrix." We will raise the fetuses without frontal lobes so that there will be no personality or anything else resembling personhood which might upset their handlers. Still, the technicians in the Organ Room (the new "OR") will marvel at the stubborn primal hardwiring which compels them to keep their voices to a reverent whisper while interacting with them. It will be no more complicated than raising a few thousand little Terry Schiavos a year, removing and distributing all of their organs to the needy, and throwing away the husk. Any remaining wincing will be met with vicious political/social opprobrium. "What are you, some Bible thumping freak?! Do you hate cancer patients, the paralyzed and diseased?! Sure, you care about little blobs floating in synthetic amniotic fluid in a lab, but you don't care about quadrapalegics!"This is going to happen. And history will look back at the turn of the 21st Century when we got over our pre-modern reverence about "life."

T paints a more political portrait of the future debate:
The Republicans will continue to control the federal government, and will still be in power when stem-cell based cures for diabetes and multiple sclerosis are developed in (respectively) South Korea and France, in 2016.Throughout 2016, Fox News will feature investigative report after investigative report about the "fetus mills" being used by "shadowy European and Asian conglomerates," but will be surprisingly uninterested in the fact that most of them are partly owned by American pharmaceutical companies. In early 2017, A bill will be introduced in the House to impose economic sanctions on all nations that participate in "fetal slavery," but will fall short of the 60-vote majority needed to break a Democratic filibuster. …Shortly thereafter, in 2020 or 2021, the remnants of the liberal media will start running news stories about prominent Republicans and their family members who "snuck away" to Europe and Asia in an effort to secretly avail themselves of the stem-cell based medical treatments for diabetes or MS that are legally available to them overseas.This will result in proposed Republican legislation to imprison anyone found guilty of "implicit fetucide" while abroad, and proposed Democratic legislation to lift the ban on stem-cell treatments. Neither bill will pass. By 2023, the Federal government will order the Centers for Disease Control to stop collecting data on the statistical incidence of specific diseases in the American population, citing the expense of such studies, their limited scientific utility, and "privacy concerns." The left-leaning blogosphere will resonate with rumors that the decision was politically motivated. Rumors will circulate, also, that American life expectancy at birth is now 15 years shorter than the rest of the industrialized world and dropping…

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I see both of these as purely 'nightmare' scenarios, neither of which is ever likely to come to pass. However, I do see the scenarios 'split down the middle'. With the possibility of creating 'clonal factories' - human clones with key genes eliminated to prevent development into fully human entities, but capable of producing stem cells etc. for research and medical treatment, the hair can be split to make everyone happy. By ensuring that stem cells come from these CF's (which are not, and could never be embryos), instead of pre-embryionic cell clusters, we can end the debate on 'where to draw the line' by redrawing it in a completely new place. Rather than concern ourselves with 'when did life begin' we can instead reap the benefits of stem cell research, cloning, etc. without concern for the destruction of 'human' or potentially human embryos.

This won't satisfy those on either fringe; those who see all human DNA derived 'life' as intrinsically worth protecting, and those who want untrammelled access to the basic building blocks of biology that using pre-embryonic or emybrionic stem lines offer - but on the whole, these CF's would allow us to have our cake (stem cell research/medicine) and eat it too (avoid the 'culture of death' where embryos are merely 'raised' for their parts).