In the case of abortion, one pits the life of the fetus against the interests of the pregnant woman.
— Leon Kass
We may simply not be wise enough to do some of the kinds of engineering things that people are talking about doing.
We owe our existence to our parents, but we actually didn't have a choice.
We are enmeshed in a lineage that came from somewhere and is going to make way for the next generation.
There is a lot of hype and fear about this much-talked-about prospect of designer babies.
The so-called right to reproduce is not an unlimited right.
The abortion controversy is important for what it says about our stance toward procreation and children altogether.
Our only responsibility is to live our own life and take care of our own children.
Once you put human life in human hands, you have started on a slippery slope that knows no boundaries.
Many people recognize that technology often comes with unintended and undesirable side effects.
It's a short step from the belief that every child should be wanted to the belief that a child exists to satisfy our wants.
Is it possible to covet a much longer life for one's self and be as devoted to the well-being of the next generation? It's a long argument.
I've been opposed to human cloning from the very beginning.
I don't believe that efforts to prohibit only so-called reproductive cloning can be successful.
Cloning represents a very clear, powerful, and immediate example in which we are in danger of turning procreation into manufacture.
As bad as it might be to destroy a creature made in God's image, it might be very much worse to be creating them after images of one's own.
The neuroscience area - which is absolutely in its infancy - is much more important than genetics.
In cloning, in contrast, reproduction is asexual - the cloned child is the product not of two but of one.
What does it mean to be an individual? What does it mean to flourish?
We know next to nothing of what we're going to know in 20 or 50 years.
There's an ancient tension between wanting to savor the world as it is and wanting to improve on the world as given.
The technological way of thinking has infected even ethics, which is supposed to be thinking about the good.
The human animal has evolved as a preeminently social animal.
Sexuality itself means mortality - equally for both man and woman.
One should proceed with caution. We may simply not be wise enough to do some of the kinds of engineering things that people are talking about doing.
Nobody knew in advance that in vitro fertilization would be, by and large, safe.
Many other countries have already banned human cloning, and there are efforts at the UN to make such a ban universal.
It seems to me that a kind of thinking which is not technocratic has an opportunity for a renaissance in this country.
If you have easy self-contentment, you might have a very, very cheap source of happiness.
I have nothing against respecting people who lived before, but we have no responsibility toward them.
Genetics is crude, but neuroscience goes directly to work on the brain, and the mind follows.
Cloning looks like a degrading of parenthood and a perversion of the right relation between parents and children.
An enormous amount of direct advertising from pharmaceutical companies are offering a kind of instantaneous solution to problems.
Technological innovation is indeed important to economic growth and the enhancement of human possibilities.
We should never rush into folly just because other nations are practicing it.
We are somehow natured, not just to reproduce, but for sociality and even for culture.
There were certain questions about the foundations of morals that advances in science all threaten to make more complicated.
The technical is not just the machinery. The technical is a disposition to life.
The benefits of biomedical progress are obvious, clear, and powerful. The hazards are much less well appreciated.
Perhaps you could sympathize with those who seek to replace a dead child with a copy, or to copy a parent or a relative or even a celebrity.
One could look over the past century and ask oneself, has the increased longevity been good, bad or indifferent?
My job is to provide the president with the richest possible consideration, so that he knows what is at stake in whatever decision he makes.
Limits have to be set on how far one can simply use the... cleverness that we have to make changes.
It's very hard to make arguments about the effects of cloning on family relations if family relations are in tatters.
If one is seriously interested in preventing reproductive cloning, one must stop the process before it starts.
I don't like being forced to reduce my thoughts to sound bites.
Even if certain rogue countries do things we wish nobody did, it doesn't necessarily mean that their foolishness should justify our following suit.
Biology, meaning the science of all life, is a late notion.
Almost everybody is enthusiastic about the promise of biotechnology to cure disease and to relieve suffering.
