"I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix"
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Krauthammer’s move here is to seize the rhetorical no-man’s-land that American abortion politics keeps pretending doesn’t exist. He opens by stripping away the standard suspicion: he’s not smuggling in theology, and he’s not claiming conception flips a magic switch called “personhood.” That first sentence is a credibility play aimed at secular liberals who associate pro-life arguments with church doctrine. Then he pivots: even if you reject religious premises and strict personhood-at-conception, it doesn’t follow that an embryo is ethically nothing.
The hangnail/appendix comparison is doing heavy work. It’s deliberately a little nasty, because trivialization is the sin he’s prosecuting. A hangnail is disposable irritation; an appendix is a vestigial organ you remove without existential regret. By choosing mundane, body-part examples, he highlights how pro-choice rhetoric can slide into a technocratic register: pregnancy as “tissue,” termination as “procedure,” moral friction sanded down by clinical language. His subtext is that a politics that can’t articulate gradations of value will end up sounding like it’s defending convenience, not autonomy.
Context matters: Krauthammer was a conservative columnist who often tried to give the right a more urbane, bioethical vocabulary. This is incrementalism in moral form: not a demand to treat embryos as full citizens, but a demand for moral seriousness. It’s an invitation to a middle position that’s emotionally legible: you can defend legal abortion while admitting there’s something there worth respecting, precisely because it is the start of a human life, not just disposable biology.
The hangnail/appendix comparison is doing heavy work. It’s deliberately a little nasty, because trivialization is the sin he’s prosecuting. A hangnail is disposable irritation; an appendix is a vestigial organ you remove without existential regret. By choosing mundane, body-part examples, he highlights how pro-choice rhetoric can slide into a technocratic register: pregnancy as “tissue,” termination as “procedure,” moral friction sanded down by clinical language. His subtext is that a politics that can’t articulate gradations of value will end up sounding like it’s defending convenience, not autonomy.
Context matters: Krauthammer was a conservative columnist who often tried to give the right a more urbane, bioethical vocabulary. This is incrementalism in moral form: not a demand to treat embryos as full citizens, but a demand for moral seriousness. It’s an invitation to a middle position that’s emotionally legible: you can defend legal abortion while admitting there’s something there worth respecting, precisely because it is the start of a human life, not just disposable biology.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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