Brave New Britain Strikes Again: OK to Test Embryos for Cholesterol Propensity
Brave New Britain is showing us the future of eugenic procreation unless we are very careful, the perceived right to only have children who pass health--and eventually attribute--muster. Where once pre-implatation genetic diagnosis was reserved to prevent babies from being born with terrible genetic conditions that would be immediately terminal, things are now moving toward weeding out those who would have a propensity to illness later in life. The latest "we never say no" UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) rubber stamp is to allow a couple to screen their IVF embryos for a gene that can cause heart disease in teenage or adult years. From the story:
A British couple have won the right to test embryos for a gene that leads to high cholesterol levels and an increased risk of heart attacks, The Times has learnt. The decision by the fertility watchdog will reopen controversy over the ethics of designer babies, as it allows doctors to screen embryos for a condition that is treatable with drugs and can be influenced by lifestyle as well as genes.While the procedure is designed to detect a rare version of a disease called familial hypercholesterolaemia (FH), which often kills children before puberty, it will also identify a milder form that can be controlled by drugs and diet. Critics argue that the test will allow couples to destroy embryos that would have had a good chance of becoming children with fulfilling and reasonably healthy lives...
Its decision breaks new ground because it permits Mr Serhal to screen out not only the severe form of the condition but also the milder type, which is usually treatable.
The tragically ironic thing about all of this is that we have reached a point where we believe we are entitled to hyper control all aspects of human life. To paraphrase Lincoln: We can control some of life's vicissitudes all of the time, or all of its vicissitudes some of the time, but we can't control all of life's vicissitudes all of the time. Talk about a doomed enterprise.
Labels: Brave New Britain. New Eugenics.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 4:27 PM
5 Comments
5 Comments:
If I am not mistaken. if a person has FH their LDL can be 400ng/dl.
I think that is a serious malady and it is justified to screen them out before they can suffer. I only lament that poor people may not have access to this service.
miligrams per deciliter I meant to say...
They do not have that (nano) low LDL...
But if this couple is screening for this, it means taht they do not have an unconditional love for their children, not to mention that they are taking the chance of killing off those children with treatable cholesterol problems.
I shudder to think that they'll screen out someone like my husband. This is just horrible. And selfish.
Who is to make the final determination on which people's lives are worth living?
But surely the couple is allowed to "kill" all the embryos, right? The idea of PGD is that they select their chosen embryo and implant (most of) it, and the others are not implanted. Whether those others are considered flawed or not is beside the point. Maybe none of the embryos will have the debilitating disease they are screening for, but they'll destroy all but one of them, regardless.
It seems to me the way to approach this is on pragmatic principles, questions of priority. The majority should realize that only a privileged minority will benefit from allowing PGD, and we should make the selfish few feel plenty guilty for diverting our doctors to their demands for healthy children. we don't have to allow them to do this. We don't have to allow people to whistle down the street, for that matter. We have not lost control of the government, we just think we have.
Christine -
You're right, most folks who screen for these kinds of diseases don't have unconditional love for the children they helped create. I got a knot in my stomach hearing about a couple who fertilized "hundreds" of embryos (according to the report I heard on the news - that may be an exaggeration but it's not mine) specifically so they could select one that had the right genetic match to their older daughter, who was dying of leukemia, I believe. They wanted their son's cord blood to donate to their daughter to save her life. But all the other embryos were either deep-frozen (and remain that way) or were donated to science. So... does that mean the older child was that much more important to them than all the children they rejected, that only one who matched her could be allowed to be born?
It seems like every time we come up with a way to "screen" for something, all we're doing is looking for new reasons to kill off someone before she's born because she'd be too inconvinent.
That ain't right.
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