First Things: Wilfred McClay writes:

Although I have tried mightily, I cannot find much merit in the idea that there is a “party of death” at work in American politics. It seems to me that this formulation states the problem wrongly. Indeed, our biotechnological enthusiasts are nothing if not partisans of life, infinitely extensible.

But what they are in love with, and advocating, is a shortsighted and impoverished vision of life: the dream of complete and unconstrained personal mastery, of the indomitable human will exercised on the inert and malleable stuff of nature by the heroically autonomous and unconditioned individual who is ever the master of his fate and captain of his soul, and whose own existence is, or deserves to be, infinitely extensible.

Such a vision eagerly embraces the Jeffersonian dictum that the earth belongs to the living and rejects the Burkean idea that society is an eternal contract among the living, the dead, and the unborn—a contract that is most powerfully manifested in the primal strength of family bonds and that serves as a profound form of prior restraint upon the individual’s room to maneuver. The constraints and duties that came with that old contract are cast off as the mere dead weight of memory. One can see these two competing views wrestling in this poignant recent article from the London Times and in the acerbic comments following it. the rest