Posted on 01/06/2007 6:04:54 PM PST by TigerLikesRooster
'Embryo Bank' Stirs Ethics Fears
Firm Lets Clients Pick Among Fertilized Eggs
By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 6, 2007; A01
A Texas company has started producing batches of ready-made embryos that single women and infertile couples can order after reviewing detailed information about the race, education, appearance, personality and other characteristics of the egg and sperm donors.
The Abraham Center of Life LLC of San Antonio, the first commercial dealer making embryos in advance for unspecified recipients, was created to help make it easier and more affordable for clients to have babies that match their preferences, according to its founder.
"We're just trying to help people have babies," said Jennalee Ryan, who arranged for an egg donor to start medical treatments to produce a second batch of embryos this week. "For me, that's what this is all about: helping make babies."
But the embryo brokerage, which calls itself "the world's first human embryo bank," raises alarm among some fertility experts and bioethicists, who say the service marks another disturbing step toward commercialization of human reproduction and "designer babies."
"We're increasingly treating children like commodities," said Mark A. Rothstein, a bioethicist at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. "It's like you're ordering a computer from Dell: You give them the specs, and they put it in the mail. I don't think we should consider mail-order computers and other products the same way we consider children."
Prospective parents have long been able to select egg or sperm donors based on ethnicity, education and other traits. Couples can also "adopt" embryos left over at fertility clinics, or have embryos created for them if they need both eggs and sperm. But the new service marks the first time anyone has started turning out embryos as off-the-shelf products.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I don’t really have a problem with a world where everyone is smart, talented, and healthy.
http://tinyurl.com/y8wjss
WASHINGTON, May 2 (UPI) -- There was something similarly strange about the children who caught Leo Kanner's attention starting in 1938. He called their behavior "autistic."
There also was something strangely similar about the families they came from.
"There is one other very interesting common denominator in the backgrounds of these children. They all come of highly intelligent families," child psychiatrist Kanner wrote at the end of his historic study of 11 children, published in 1943.
He ticked off the fathers' occupations: four psychiatrists, one "brilliant lawyer," one chemist and law school graduate, one plant pathologist, one professor of forestry, one ad copywriter with a law degree, one mining engineer and one businessman.
"All but three of the families," Kanner wrote, "are represented either in 'Who's Who in America' or in 'American Men of Science,' or both."
Among the first 100 cases Kanner saw, he reported they "almost invariably came from intelligent and sophisticated stock." Of the 100 fathers, 96 were high school grads and, of those, 74 were college grads -- almost twice today's percentage...
(article continues)
I did have a link for the other guy, but I'm afraid the poll I mentioned is beyond Googling, and I don't remember much about it other than it was done in England in the past few years.
Oh, great. So many members of Congress and state legislatures who started out their careers as attorneys are eligible.
Clintons? Oh, no!
But did she, are did she not, graduate from a law school????
Ya, from Ted Kennedy's law school.
Even one baby is too many babies, if you're treating them like products, property, chattel.
The most obvious problem is that IVF "begets" or produces more offspring than will be implanted in your womb. That results in two really inhuman options: (1) killing your "surplus" offspring (or storing them in frozen form until they deteriorate and are ultimately dumped); or (2) using the embryo as a human experimental subject, without any of the safeguards essential to its moral status as a nascent human being.
The third problem is that the entire process of ovum extraction, sperm collection, in vitro fertilization, and so forth, has already reduced human procreation to an laboratory procedure resulting in a product who/which is a commodity in commercial transaction.
The entire distinction between a human being, a lab animal, and a bit of biological property is in smithereens.
So we (Americans) are right back where we were at the time of the Dred Scott decision of 1857, with the law unable to distinguish between a human being and a piece of property. Except at a potentially worse degree of complexity, since the human genome can now be altered through the introduction of heterologous genes, and the embryo manipulated into forms of abnormal development, so that distinguishing between "human" and "not-human" becomes almost impossible.
When Aldous Huxley wrote "Brave New World," he assumed --- didn't he? --- that people would want to prevent this from happening. There must be somebody out there who is thinking strategically about how to stop this whole race to total depersonalization. I think it should be done.
Ironically, for those folks, babies is the only thing you CAN have too much of! ;o)
Crap Grammar alert!! LOL!
Correction: Ironically, babies ARE the only things of which you can have too many!
Demographics are always tricky to decipher, and it is easy to make too much of too little, but at some point all sorts of families began having autistic kids, and that ominous pattern may well be visible in the first 100 cases.
The latest research (not from 1938) that I've seen on the causes of autism seems to show at least one link to older fathers.
Nothing is terribly clear in complex genetics. For example a predisposition to autism that doesn't manifest as autism may tend to make people very intelligent.
There may be an environmental window for an outside factor to occur to activate autism; if the child makes it past that window, they are no longer susceptible.
I agree that parental age may be a factor, but is it age, or is it something else the parents "picked up" along the way, like smoking, drinking, diet, etc., that had a cumulative effect.
And yet, in practical terms, intelligent people may well be statistically more likely to have autistic children.
But as with another recent discovery, Fragile X Syndrome, it might be very obvious or very subtle.
I remember reading an article in a Howard County (MD) newspaper in which the author was trying to figure out why Howard County had one of the worst rates of child abuse in the USA. Howard County is home to a high percentage of wealthy and very well-educated people, and is where one of the earliest and best of the "planned communities," Columbia MD, is located.
The upshot was that intensely wanted and meticulously planned children tend to be very much the vehicles of their parents' egos. They are expected to be irresistably cute, invariably emotionally rewarding, hyper-bright, high-achieving from the earliest age, etc. And when they "fall short" in any way --- when they cry a lot as babies or have a persistent rash, or dribble fudge sauce on the white-and-gold brocade sofa, or fail to be interested in the Teach-Your-Toddler-Japanese tapes, etc. --- the parents tend to either get terribly frustrated and angry, or they detach emotionally and lose interest in the child altogether.
Kids who are the result of expensive laboratory procedures, will be under enormous pressure to repay the investment in many ways. Their parents have expections related to their childrens' status as products, rather than as persons.
There's more than a whiff of the inhuman in the genetically engineered, ubermensch dream.
It is inevitable - true. Whether it will be good or not, will depend on how it will be done. If done by ignoramuses and illiterates, then there are good chances it will be done poorly. Accumulation of necessary knowledge could be expected to take several generations.
Hydrogen dirigibles were the "wave of the future" until the Hindenburg disaster. A large and well-publicized human-genetic-engineering horror could take elaborate artificial-reproduction and human genetic engineering off the agenda for centuries.
One can hope.
Death and taxes may be inevitable, but evolutionary selection for high IQ is not inevitable at all; and neither is the prospect of some elite group of humans seizing control of the evolutionary direction of humanity.
Possible, yes. Inevitable, no.
This is sinful beyond belief. I am shocked and appalled. Evil triumphs when good men do nothing. I hope the Texans outlaw this firm and shut them down. Or force the company to raise every one of the "embryos" to adulthood - including paying for their collegte.
Great comments.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.