Posted on 12/03/2005 7:26:30 PM PST by Coleus
Childbirth: Flawed Babies Need Not Apply
Members of the secular scientific community take their moral and intellectual purity seriously, as we have seen from the continuing debate on Intelligent Design. Vested in white lab coats, they appear as high priests of the god of Reason, they defend their model of intractably theistic Darwinism.
It would be easier to accept the priestly purity of the scientific caste, however, if its members didn't routinely descend from high-mindedness in decisions clearly made mostly to please the customer. Take, for instance, recent activities in the world of pre- natal screening, where separate articles (in the October 28 Toronto Globe and Mail and the August 19 London Times) have reported on the expansion of screening tests so that preborns with a laundry list of conditions — some quite treatable — can be fingered for extinction. Officials in Ontario, for example, are planning to routinely test for 21 metabolic conditions, up from the two tests currently administered. The same Globe and Mail article reported on research published in the Journal of Pediatrics showing that the rate of Canadian babies born with cystic fibrosis has declined from 1 in 2,714 (before a genetic test was developed) to 1 in 3,608 (now that tests can pinpoint which embryos carry this disease). Science can't offer the afflicted embryos a cure, but it is willing to offer the parent the option of aborting the baby and trying again.
Meanwhile, British doctors at the Clinical Sciences Center in Hammersmith and Queen Charlotte's Hospital have come up with a pre-natal test for hemophilia that identifies the sufferer before implantation has taken place. And this summer a London clinic received government permission to test embryos for a gene connected with retinoblastoma, a condition causing eye tumors that is rarely fatal and in 95 percent of cases can be successfully treated. The doctor who received the license to conduct the retinoblastoma screening last year was granted permission to screen the unborn for a gene associated with bowel cancer.
Not surprisingly, Australian-born ethicist Julian Savulescu, who heads the Oxford University Center for Practical Ethics and also assists Melbourne's Murdoch Children's Research Institute, has connected the dots and come up with a "moral obligation" for parents to use screening technologies to produce "the best child possible." Not shy of thinking along Brave New World terms, Savulescu argues that we should use screening tests "not just to screen out diseases, but in looking at the kind of characteristics our children are likely to have." Characteristics, he suggests (apparently without irony), like kindness and fairness.
Of course, parents who believe their unborn child has a right to life even if disabled or afflicted may not agree, but someday soon insurance companies, for example, are likely to recognize publicly where their bread is buttered. The bottom-line mentality, after all, is not just reserved for the scientific and medical communities. Prospective parents and medical fertility specialists have pooled their mutual self-interest recently to loosen restrictions on who qualifies for in vitro fertilization. In Britain, the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HFEA), which determines norms for approval of couples wishing to use IVF, decided to reduce "burdensome or intrusive elements" from their qualifications. The couple seeking an IVF child no longer need to make a "commitment to raise children." Fertility clinics do not need to take into account whether the couple are in a stable relationship or how old the prospective parents are. Just step up and pay your money. And don't worry — if the baby turns out to be imperfect, scrap that one and try all over again.
And on the side the scientists conduct other interesting experiments, like creating a human embryo with genetic material from two mothers (bringing to mind the Woody Allen joke that most of us barely survive one mother). The justification for fooling around with "mother" nature is the possibility of preventing a mother's bad genes from being transmitted to her offspring. But it's also likely that, if the two-mothers technique is fine-tuned, some lesbian partners would jump at the chance to become dual genetic mothers of a child. So it goes in the non-judgmental world of "pure" science.
Madame X works in Washington DC for the federal government. Because of her employer, she must write under a pseudonym.
Intelligent Design: Shades Of Nazism.
Good post. Save for further research.
ACK!
I've heard many stories of women who have been told their fetus had down syndrome, who decided to go full term and ended up with a healthy baby. A lot of babies are being killed based on bad test results.
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