"Lines must be drawn"

Amy Welborn has pointed out a recent column in Time by Charles Krauthammer, psychiatrist and pundit, in which he says this:


"When I was 22 and a first-year medical student, I suffered a spinal-cord injury. I have not walked in 32 years. I would be delighted to do so again. But not at any price. I think it is more important to bequeath to my son a world that retains a moral compass, a world that when unleashing the most powerful human discovery since Alamogordo — something as protean, elemental, powerful and potentially dangerous as the manipulation and re-formation of the human embryo — recognizes that lines must be drawn and fences erected."


Mr. Krauthammer does not draw the line exactly where the Church draws it, but he makes very important points.


"Honorable people will draw the line in different places because this is not an issue of reason vs. ignorance, as the Democrats have portrayed it, but of recognizing two important competing human values: the thirst for knowledge and cures on the one hand and, on the other, the respect for even embryonic human life and a well-grounded respect for the proven human capacity to misuse newly acquired powers, in this case, the power to manipulate, reshape, dissect and redesign the developing human embryo."