Friday, January 19, 2007

Please Tell Me I Did Not Just Read This...

From an op-ed in today's NYT about how Solomonic and groovy Dubya's stem cell "compromise" was:
...The human embryo is a human organism, but is this being — microscopically small, with no self-awareness and little resemblance to us — a person, with a right to life?

Many advocates of federal financing for embryo-destructive research begin from a negative answer to that question. They argue that the human embryo is just too small, too unlike us in appearance, or too lacking in consciousness or sensitivity to pain or other critical mental capacity to be granted a place in the human family. But surely America has learned the hard way not to assign human worth by appearances. And surely we would not deny those who have lost some mental faculties the right to be regarded with respect and protected from harm. Why should we deny it to those whose faculties are still developing?

Um. Did he just argue that being an embryo is akin to having a disability? That it's shallow to discriminate against embryos simply because they're about as big as rice and don't have functioning brains?

Who the hell is this jackass?

Yuval Levin, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a former executive director of the President’s Council on Bioethics.
Oh. Right, then. Carry on, you're doing a heckuva job.

5 comments:

MEC said...

This reminds me of an article I read in The Nation after Bush named Leon Kass to be his advisor on bioethics. Mr. Kass is an advocate of basing ethical decisions on "the ick factor": if we think -- or rather, if he thinks something is icky, then that is conclusive ratinal evidence that it's a bad thing and we shouldn't do it.

Which works for me, because I think agreeing with Bush or any of his minions is icky.

Godness said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Godness said...

freestyleplaya

best4you said...

Great post, worth following. kfc โปรโมชั่น

โปรโมชั่น

tonybangjak69 said...


This article is very well written. Please share. Thank you.
tonyhatenablog
tonybloglovin.com
site123.me
tonywixsite
smartboy3131