Human embryos "more primitive than mosquitos"

Noted American intellectual Michael Kinsley spews hatred towards who he once was. (I propose the sobriquet "self hating fetus" for such folks.)

For columnist Michael Kinsley human embryos are at once valuable and valueless. Their parts contain a possible cure for his Parkinson's disease, yet they are "biologically more primitive than a mosquito," he wrote last Sunday in the Los Angeles Times. Kinsley is very enamored with this mosquito-embryo comparison. He's used it before in previous columns to drive home the point that disposing of human embryos should generate even less thought than swatting a mosquito. For good measure in this column Kinsley also calls human embryos "tiny clumps of cells" lest we fail to grasp how silly it is to consider them worthy of respect.

Historians of ideas should clip Kinsley's columns on this subject as a straightforward example of the American elite's rancid and heedless moral philosophy circa 2000. They reveal that as the age of cloning advances, the elite, demanding longevity at all moral costs, consoles itself with the thought that the class of lab humans they hope to form are "more primitive" than insects. The human embryo is the one endangered species they won't protect and will use as their utopian science's slave.

What inspired Kinsley's most recent column was the news that South Korean scientists had cloned human embryos as spare parts for science. Kinsley regards this as a wonderful development. But he is upset with those like Leon Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, who in the wake of the news were mulling "morality and all that." The usually skeptical Kinsley has boundless confidence in these South Korean scientists and rebuked ethicists like Kass for challenging these all-knowing men with time-wasting questions.

But if Kinsley won't question science, he will question God. "I have no trouble feeling that the government should value my life more than the lives of these clumps," he wrote. "God may disagree. But the government reports to me and to other adult Americans, not to God."

"Morality and all that" must be swept aside so that one group of human beings can exploit a class of weaker human beings, mere "clumps." It doesn't occur to Kinsley that the very diseased people he thinks this embryo-destroying research will cure are the ones least likely to survive in the dehumanized, self-centered ethos he's advocating to justify it. He throws down the gauntlet and says in his subhead, "Mr. Bush, don't I matter more than tiny clumps of cells?" One day, probably not very long from now, society will say, "No, Mr. Kinsley, you don't. We don't think disabled adults are valuable." And at that point, what principle will protect him? He belittles bioethicists for marshalling arguments against therapeutic cloning that "are concerned with the nature of humanity and stuff." It is those arguments that protect the weak and vulnerable from the designs of a dehumanized scientific culture. (Thanks to The American Spectator)