The Arbitrary ChuckJerry

Mitt Romney is the governor of Massashusetts and this week his administration issued regulations designed to hinder stem cell research. Essentially they banned the creation of embryos for strictly research purposes. Romney said:

"I believe it crosses a very bright moral line to take sperm and eggs in the laboratory and start creating human life. It is Orwellian in its scope. In laboratories you could have trays of new embryos being created."

You could argue all day about stem cell research and the ethical issues involved. I'm not really interested in that at the moment. I'm more interested in the fact that he said it's Orwellian, when I don't think it really is. Orwell was way more about controlling the population and really taking the Socialism thing to the extreme. This isn't that.

In reading his quote immediately I thought that rather than Orwellian, really stem cell research is more Huxleyan. I mean "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley is really just about that. It's a society where the people are created in test tubes rather than sexually and the population doesn't really have a say in reproduction. It's also a statement about Socialism, but really applies much better to the stem cell argument. And the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that the term "Orwellian" really doesn't apply at all.