Parenting & Family Quote by Leon Kass

“Degrading,” “perversion,” “right relation” - Kass doesn’t argue about lab feasibility or safety here; he argues about moral grammar. The sentence is engineered to make cloning feel less like a technical option and more like a category mistake, a violation of how family is supposed to mean. By choosing charged words that belong to the register of sexuality and taboo (“perversion”) rather than policy (“risk,” “regulation”), he frames cloning as an act that stains the human rather than merely complicates it.

The intent is conservative in the deepest sense: to protect an asymmetry at the heart of parenthood. In Kass’s preferred picture, a child arrives as a surprise, a gift that no one fully authors. Cloning, by contrast, reads as design - a tilt from welcoming to manufacturing. The subtext is anxiety about control: if a parent can replicate a genome, the child’s identity may start as an expectation, even a project. “Right relation” is doing quiet but heavy work here, implying that dignity in families depends on limits, on accepting that children are not extensions of parental will.

Context matters. Kass became one of America’s most visible bioethics voices in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, when Dolly the sheep and the rush of reproductive technologies made “Can we?” outrun “Should we?” His language tries to slow that momentum by making cloning socially legible as not just a new technique but a new kind of parent-child power dynamic - one that risks turning love into management and lineage into a mirror.