National Review‘s new commentator Bronwen Catherine McShea is spooked by bioethics. The argument in this extended comment piece is essentially that bioethics has made it all but impossible for anti-abortion folks to be heard in academic circles. I was starting to feel for Ms. McShea before she pulled out the big guns:
Another chilling moment took place at a Harvard Law School talk this past fall, when Glenn McGee, a noted bioethicist from the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics, gleefully marveled at the “interesting” ethical implications of the half-human “things” already being created in laboratories in California and elsewhere. The law students present hardly blinked, interested mainly in the legal strategies the “ethicist” had to offer for bypassing pro-life legislation on the issue of cloning and embryonic-stem-cell research.