Eugenically Child Born in Brave New Britain
Several SHSers have sent me the story of the birth of the baby girl, who was selected "in" as an embryo, as her "defective" siblings were destroyed, and permitted to be implanted and born because she did not carry a gene that gives rise to breast cancer. Yuval Levin has already discussed this matter over at NRO's blog The Corner, and he points out both the ethical implications of this event and an example of post modernism in journalism in which the BBC redefined "conception" to mean implantation in the womb instead of fertilization. From Levin's post:
I believe that these procedures, while well-meaning, are the early steps that will ultimately lead to a utilitarian dystopia of the kind warned against by Aldous Huxley. As I wrote in Consumer's Guide to a Brave New World:Better to eradicate the carriers, it seems, than to risk a potentially curable if very serious adult-onset illness. So should cancer patients wish they had never been born? Should the rest of us wish they hadn't been? The BBC itself then [states]:
Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) involves taking a cell from an embryo at the eight-cell stage of development, when it is around three-days old, and testing it. This is before conception--defined as when the embryo is implanted in the womb.By whom, exactly, is "conception" defined as "when the embryo is implanted in the womb"? I suppose if you can't deny that life begins at conception you just insist that conception means whatever you want it to mean. So why not call it "pre-conception genetic diagnosis"?
Curing the disease by killing the patient is hardly a step forward for medicine, and eliminating the unfit before they’re born so they won't pass on their genes to future generations is just eugenics, pure and simple. That little girl is very lucky to be alive.
Huxley's novel [Brave New World] never described the events that led to the end of history. Had he written a prequel, what might he have imagined induced the ancestors of the characters in his novel to unleash a biotechnology that became so powerful that it resulted in a "Brave New Man...so dehumanized that he doesn't even realize what has been lost" [in the words of Leon Kass]. Perhaps it would have been a fervent desire to exercise hyper-control over our health and mortality, a trend building to gale force in our own time.I was referencing embryonic stem cells. But I think pre-implantation genetic diagnosis qualifies too. In our understandable desire to alleviate potential future suffering, we presume to decide who is worthy of being born and who should not be allowed to live. Once that principle is accepted, it will go from stopping embryos and fetuses with a propensity to cancer, Down syndrome, dwarfism, and other disabling conditions or illnesses from being born (or killing them as newborns if a mistake is made and they are born), to wiping out people with conditions that may be socially disdained, such as a propensity to obesity or homosexuality (if a genetic cause is ever identified).
I submit we have not the wisdom for such hyper-control. I submit that all of us must be welcomed equally in life, or at some point we will all reach the point where most of us will be in pronounced danger of being hustled out of it.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 1:58 PM
15 Comments
15 Comments:
Since when is the BBC a dictionary, let alone an authority on when conception occurs? That's an interesting conflation between media, definition, pronouncement without basis, propaganda, and authority.
This is what happens when we mess with things too much and when we want the "benefits" of "scientific progress." Treat lab animals -- living beings -- as selectable, useable, discardable material, with no rights, including to life, and end up treating humans and human embryos the same way. If humans are animals, and evolution is true, and other animals don't have ethics, we can't assume that our ethics are fully formed as if they were born out of Zeus's head, and sufficiently developed and reliable to protect us from our own impulses to "progress," which we wouldn't need to do in the first place if we were fully in order, and we can't expect not to make ethical errors in the course of "progressing," or for our attempts to rectify the ethics problem we've got to work sufficiently well to protect us from ourselves. If we want to "progress," and are exceptionaly human, eugenics are going to have to be part of it, and we should stop worrying about it and just take our medicine. Or, we could be grateful to have what we have and start treating life with more respect, which we need to practice at by refraining from animal experimentation. People have been reproducing without "fertility science" and without having messed with embryos for a long time, and produced some pretty good human specimens along the way. This whole fertility science thing is just another aspect of hedonism. We have nine million choices in the supermarket now thanks to "human progress" and are similarly picky now re offspring. Not that food tastes as good as it once did or the sanctity of life is respected anymore. What did we think would happen when we got started with it -- that it would just help people who couldn't have families have them? But if we want the "scientific progress to help mankind," we can't also expect to be able to control it ethically (yet another reason to remain old-fashioned -- and human). Can't have cake and eat it too.
How many embryos ARE there? How many people would they be if they were all given the opportunity to gestate and be born? How many get created every time someone goes to a fertility clinic? Where are they? Are there enough women with enough time, and are there enough resources, to bear and give birth to and raise them? Are we logistically able to welcome them all into life? Because if we're not, and they all should be welcomed into life, we'd better stop with this "progress" nonsense right this very minute. Which would be fine with me, mind you.
As for being in pronounced danger of being hustled out of it, we all already are, when we get old. "At some point" floated past us down the river quite a while ago, and things are only getting worse in that regard, in warp speed.
I think the most obscene part of this was the way the article suggested that there would be fewer abortions due to eugenics if only healthy embryos were allowed to implant, as if the embryos weren't being aborted after being created! It's sick!
I think the most obscene part of this was the way the article suggested that there would be fewer abortions due to eugenics if only healthy embryos were allowed to implant, as if the embryos weren't being aborted after being created! It's sick!
Given that in most IVF procedures, more embryos are created than are implanted, it seems sensible to choose the 'best' embryos for implantation.
I'm mostly interested not in whether PGD is immoral, but whether it is considered less moral in comparison to 'normal' IVF (assuming the same number of embryos are destroyed).
I've never understood why people get all wound up about not being able to reproduce in the first place. People just want what they want and have no respect for nature. We started messing with reproduction re non-human animals, with business and financial concerns involved that made their lives not what God intended and produced, for example, more fragile racehorses; part of the sport of racehorsing, by nature, is taking a chance on the breeding, and waiting for breeding to produce the winning specimen in its own due time, but no, the investors want their money now. Life -- for non-human and human animals alike, no longer has the quality of life. Restraint, discipline, delayed gratification, grace, taste, and style have gone out the window and ignorance, lack of taste, lack of standards, and hedonism have taken over. Naturally medicine is no longer medicine, education has suffered, ethics are no longer ethics, futile-care theory is running things now, etc. Everything has to be right away and everyone has to have what they want and the things that make life worth living no longer are even in the picture, while it has become normal to "make things happen" via "science," whether it's creating a child, aborting a foetus, withdrawing life support, getting rid of the elderly and the disabled, etc. Meanwhile, there hasn't been much coverage of it in the media that I've seen, but I do recall reading a little item a while ago that reported that children created via i.v.f. have weaker immune systems. Surprise, surprise.
In my list of things that we want to have right away and make happen in the latter half of my previous post, I forgot to include "assisted suicide." We've got a death culture at the same time we've lost what makes for a life culture, which is more than simply valuing life; it's those things such as taste, grace, refinement, restraint, discipline, etc. It took millenia to invent box springs; most box springs stopped having springs in them (too much work, "cost considerations," etc.) at about the same time futons came in; medicine used to consider ethics and is now futilitarian; it's just too much work to tend to the elderly and disabled, etc. The list could go on and on. It's about people not having the necessary intelligence and common sense, and not being willing to do the necessary work to have what is of value, and no longer even realizing what is of value, and the faster "science, technology, and medicine" "advance" us, the further we fall behind. When it was more work to keep a house lit and warm than it is now, people also had more manners and were more civilized and had more of a sense of morality. Now we have electricity, central heating, and futilitarianism. Because we're spoiled and lazy, and nothing and no one was holding us back and keeping our noses to the grindstone re character and values. Similarly, refraining from experimentation on animals would benefit not just them, but our own souls. "Religion" means literally "to tie back," or "to hold back." If that's the basis for human exceptionalism, human exceptionalism needs to take into account that just because we are able to do something and it gives us what we consider benefits without a downside to ourselves doesn't mean that we are right about that, and that we shouldn't refrain from doing it for our own sake as well as theirs. And the same with fertility medicine. We'd be better off using our science to clean up the environment -- not because of "global warming," or "environmental rights" (though it's consistent with them), but because it's not good manners to make a mess and leave a place in a other than as good a condition than one found it. If we don't have the manners not to create the untidy, unaesthetic, unhealthy conditions we have on earth (regardless of "global warming" and the rest of it), no wonder we don't have the manners to respect the lives of the elderly and the disabled, and not to be utilitarian. It's really very simple.
SHS: I agree that we don't have the wisdom to exercise such hyper-control. By extension, we also don't seem to have the wisdom to keep our science in its proper place, as a servant to us, or to see why using non-human animals in scientific/medicine is good for us, and of course it's obvious what lack of wisdom we've displayed re the value of life, and of sheer considerations of aesthetics (which to me is a valid moral index) and health when it comes to "the environment." Not that the smell of gasoline when cars were still cars wasn't wonderful, and that falls under the category of aesthetics, but the rest of the injury we've done to the environment we have to look at and use every day (rivers, lakes, the ocean with styrofoam floating in it, the results of cap mining, etc.) isn't pretty, and isn't healthy. It would take more work and intelligence and less greed and impatience to avoid and remedy those problems, and those are exactly the same qualities that we need to recover in order to stop the death culture and return to a life culture. When we started becoming scientific and industrial, a human-exceptional viewpoint held that the mess it was making was justified because after all we are humans and speciallly entitled and this is progress. Now look what we've got. It's not that we're not special because we can do what we can do; it's that we're not special enough, and not special enough to do the work involved in all that of which we are capable. Whereas non-human animals do all of which they are capable, which in fact puts them ahead of us, and part of why we need them around us is to learn from them, which we're too arrogant to do. We're lazy, which goes along with being arrogant, and calling ourselves "exceptional" is just an excuse.
I have actually seen this definition being used for the last couple of years among reproductive rights activists, and doctors, too.
holyterror: Thanks for posting.
Redefining terms for political purposes has become ubiquitous in science, and it is corrupting the field. I had not seen this particular example. In checking around, I found it has been in use in the UK for some time as a rationalization for the destruction of embryos in IVF, while embryo text books generally still state, accurately, that a new human organism commences at the completion of fertilization. A pregnancy begins upon implantation, but what is implanted has already been conceived. Nor is it a mere "egg" as others have stated.
It already HAS corrupted the field. Because the field was willing to go along with it; in fact, I think that the field is running the show, and wants every possible excuse to do as it pleases. People go along with it because they want the "benefits" and because they are intimidated by its being "science," and this is the result.
oops I left a "not" out above; non-human animals should NOT be used... Along with the loss of what we've lost has been money becoming the first priority. THAT is why science has adopted political agendas. No one is controlling it. People are willing to discuss what rent they pay these days; "good journalism" involves asking one's age and people answer the question; there is no longer restraint regarding those things that everyone used to know why they simply are not to be discussed for the same reason money is never supposed to be the first priority in anything; similarly "political science" now is driving the train, and it manifests in lack of ethics, doctors following hospital policy rather than the Hippocratic oath because their jobs, their careers, their salaries mean more to them than the life of the patient, because, after all, they are doctors, they are scientists, they had to work hard and make sacrifices (God forbid) to become as important as they are, in a culture where working hard and making sacrifices are not the norm, and their parents wanted them to be doctors and scientists for reasons of status and material gain -- and that syndrome started at the same time as the holocaust of laboratory animals began as the result of the Nuremberg code; then science and the consideration of money-first brought us "advances" that have destroyed quality of life and caused "quality of life" to be a component of utilitarian reasoning (there's another oxymoron), or rather rationale, and the death culture.
Just this morning a medical resident who wrote during what his internship what sounds like a very interesting book that apparently addresses what goes on in hospitals, which is about to become a movie, mentioned in a tv interview that the insurance and pharmaceutical industries are key factors in the syndrome I just mentioned, and that their interests do not include the well-being of the patient. No one thought about the well-being of the animals when the Nuremberg code became instituted; this is the result. It's so simple and such basic, basic, elementary, rudimentary, etc. common sense that one feels like banging one's head on the blackboard, and it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the status of the various species. But it does have to do with the ethics and logic that are essential to our own species' survival.
All of this discussion over what is obviously an error that got past the editors. It is PREGNANCY that can be said to occur at implantation. Conception happens when sperm fertilizes egg.
Give History Writer a Kupie Doll! That is correct. But I am told that the language in the UK has been politicized in some circles to use the language as contained in this report.
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