Professor Hurlbut, Your 15 Minutes are Up

LifeSite is a sort of barometer for the day to day pulse of the anti-abortion community, and from the very moment that William Hurlbut floated his dramatic new plan to save us all from the terror of destroying frozen embryos it was clear that, as we foretold, the clock had started on his poorly thought-out "work-around" for stem cells: intentionally producing disabled embryos. True, for a bit it looked like Leon Kass would push Hurlbut's idea into the fore, with his announcement that the President's bioethics commission would be discussing it (and other ideas), and with his subsequent claim that Hurlbut's idea could save us all from having to debate stem cell ethics any longer. Catholic and protestant fundamentalist leaders jumped for joy. But it was only a matter of time before even the 'pro-life' community would wake up to realize that embracing Hurlbut's half-baked neoscientific plan meant doing all sorts of things that amount to what they typically term "playing God."

And so, exactly eight days after it showered Hurlbut with adoration for saving the tiny people, the pro-life lobby has officially turned on Professor Hurlbut for crimes against the little embryos. One biologist interviewed for the "hang hurlbut" piece in LifeSite today puts their indictment of him squarely: "...the process would not create an unknown 'new entity,' but a severely disabled, cloned human being." The anti-abortion people even have an excuse for embracing Hurlbut: they were too dizzied by all that complicated science stuff: "Possibly due to the extremely rarified nature of the technical language, few reservations were raised at the meeting, even by the pro-life Catholics present."