It isn't the moral and political dilemma you make it out to be necessarily. It isn't even a logical dilemma --well of course that depends on your background. There are some who would try to draw some distinction between the life lost in the petri dish at the hand of a scientist and that which is lost in a fertility center at the hands of a clinic doctor. There are many however who don't.

Life is life. And both destructions are tragic. The researcher's embryonic guinea pig is tragic because of its denial of life to what few people deny is human life. When we were kids we were told about a few things that distinguish humans, fingerprints, personalities, etc. But we find as adults that some of these don't necessarily apply. Or, at least they don't apply in the ways we once thought. Fingerprint analyses and iris/retinal identification don't really apply to those without fingers or born without eyes. Distinguished personailty does not apply to some who are mentally retarded to the points of having barely any distuinguishable personhood.

The most basic salient expression of a human, we've found very recently, is an individualized genetic pattern. The new embryo shares his/her own with no other human being which ever has nor ever will exist with the exception of the identical twin. That is why humanity starts at the embryo. Whether that embryo is carried to full term, experimented on before fully developing, discarded when it is not seen as useful for its parents' use, pulled apart in its mother womb, or vaccuumed out, it is or was a individual life.

There are some of us who ascribe to the Seamless Garment theory of life. It opposes equally (and uncompromisingly) embryonic stem cell research and destrucive fertility practices.