Reductio ad absurdum

I have always wanted to believe that the people who do Catholic bioethics are not really committed to the things that they purport to believe. It seems to unfair to demand that anyone scientifically literate can really suppose that ‘life begins at conception’; and so much kinder to suppose that they are faking. But it’s difficult to be charitable about Helen Watt, of the Linacre Centre, who told yesterday’s Daily Telegraph that therapeutic cloning was morally worse than reproductive cloning: “Reproductive cloning is bad but it does not have a 100 per cent failure rate whereas in therapeutic cloning all the embryos die”.