Daily Inspiration Quote by Leon Kass

Kass’s line is a warning dressed up as a definition. He doesn’t argue about embryos or lab protocols; he reaches for a category shift: “procreation” versus “manufacture.” That contrast is doing the heavy lifting. Procreation, in this framing, is intimate, unpredictable, and morally thick - a human relationship that produces a person. Manufacture is repeatable, quality-controlled, and accountable to a customer. By calling cloning an “immediate example,” Kass isn’t just naming a technology; he’s naming a slippery slope with a deadline.

The intent is preventative. Kass wants to fix cloning in the public imagination as a boundary-crossing act before the policy details blur into technicalities. “Clear” and “powerful” are cues to treat this as self-evident, not as one contested option in a menu of reproductive choices. The subtext is that once we accept the logic of making children to spec, we will import the ethics of production: defect, upgrade, return, optimize. A cloned child becomes a project with performance metrics, and parenthood starts to resemble management.

Context matters: Kass became a prominent bioethics gatekeeper in an era when IVF, genetic screening, and stem-cell research were rapidly normalizing the idea that reproduction can be assisted, selected, and engineered. His rhetorical move is to draw a bright moral line early, before “choice” language takes over. The unease he channels isn’t strictly religious; it’s civic. A society that treats origins as design problems risks treating people as products - and products are easier to own, rank, and discard.