“The week-old embryos used for stem cell research are
microscopic clumps of cells, unthinking and unknowing, with fewer
physical human qualities than a mosquito,” writes Michael Kinsley
in the Washington Post. He makes this
incredible statement in the course of rebuking George Bush for
insincere moral anguish about stem cell research.
“Conservatives wonder why so many liberals don’t just disagree
with President Bush’s policies, but seem to dislike him personally.
The story of stem cell research may help to explain,” writes
Kinsley. If Bush had likened human embryos to mosquitoes, Americans
might have reason to dislike him. But only Kinsley has done
that.
Because Kinsley wants human embryos treated as casually as one
would treat an insect, he has to describe week-old human embryos as
no more human than mosquitoes (or perhaps Kinsley means less human
than insects, since he says week-old embryos have “fewer physical
human qualities than a mosquito.”)
Which raises the question: If week-old human embryos have “fewer
physical human qualities than a mosquito,” why are they so valuable
as spare parts for the liberals’ medical research? Why don’t they
harvest the parts of mosquitoes? It is the human qualities in the
embryo Kinsley compares to a mosquito that liberals need in order
to do their research.
Geneticists report that after conception the human embryo
possesses a complete and unique genetic code that establishes such
things as sex, eye color, skin color, hair color, and bone
structure.
“To accept the fact that after fertilization has taken place a
new human has come into being is no longer a matter of taste or
opinion. The human nature of the human being from conception to old
age is not a metaphysical contention, it is plain experimental
evidence,” said the French geneticist Jerome Lejeune. “Each of us
has a very precise starting moment which is the time at which the
whole necessary and sufficient genetic information is gathered
inside one cell, the fertilized egg, and this is the moment of
fertilization.
“There is not the slightest doubt about that and we know that
this information is written on a kind of ribbon which we call the
DNA…At no time is the human being a blob of protoplasm. As
far as your nature is concerned, I see no difference between the
early person that you were at conception and the late person which
you are now. You were, and are, a human being.”
Lejeune would be surprised to learn from Kinsley that a week-old
embryo has fewer physical human qualities than a mosquito.
Kinsley tells his readers that “Bush’s alleged moral anguish on
this subject is unimpressive” as he parades his own lack of moral
anguish about the mistreatment of embryos. “If the president is not
a complete moron — and he probably is not — he is a hardened
cynic, staging moral anguish he does not feel, pandering to people
he cannot possibly agree with and sacrificing the future of many
American citizens for short-term political advantage,” he
writes.
It takes a hardened cynic like Kinsley to reduce human embryos
to the level of mosquitoes, then denounce a president unwilling to
make that equation for moral crassness. Kinsley’s column gives
readers a good reason to dislike him.
Whenever liberals want to justify an indefensible act — such as
using human embryos as experimental fodder for their research —
they twist language to obscure the nature of the act. If they want
to squash a human embryo like an insect, they compare it to a
mosquito. If they want to starve to death a comatose woman, they
call her a vegetable.
The brutality of liberalism is neatly concealed inside calls for
compassion. And it is true that liberals do feel great compassion
— for themselves. Bush, says Kinsley, is “insulting to the people
(including me) whose lives could be saved or redeemed by the
medical breakthroughs Bush’s stem cell policy is preventing.”
Bush’s resistance to a medical culture in which human embryos
are treated as guinea pigs for research will save and redeem lives.
But not the lives Kinsley considers important. His life is
important; the lives of human embryos aren’t.
Liberals normally hate Republican presidents for what they see
as a lack of moral concern toward the defenseless. But Kinsley
encourages liberals to hate this one for extending too much concern
to defenseless human embryos.
