Parental Pressure to Pick Progeny

In our continuing insistence on perfecting ourselves vicariously through our children, parents in the United States may have a new set of decisions to weigh, once they’ve made the difficult initial decision to utilize in vitro fertilization (IVF) to conceive.

Tests are now available that can alert parents to potential future health risks in their children such as breast cancer and diabetes.  The tests also promise – based on genetic markers – to alert parents if it looks as though one of their fertilized embryos may be at risk for abnormally low intelligence levels.

Just so we’re clear here, these tests can be carried out on fertilized eggs, also known as embryos, also known as teeny tiny little human beings.  It has to be an embryo so that the complete, unique genetic/DNA material is available for analysis, something that is available once an egg is fertilized with a sperm.  It has to wait for fertilization because all the data isn’t there yet otherwise.  It only becomes a unique human being when an egg is fertilized by a sperm.

Which is  why I oppose abortion.  We’re killing human beings.  Distinct from the mother and the father.  Not fingernails or hair clippings or any of the other completely inane nonsense that is sometimes pushed to defend or justify murder.

For further clarity, IVF is expensive and difficult.  For this reason, multiple eggs are culled from the mother and fertilized externally.  Because the process is inherently unstable and risky to the teeny tiny human being, it is standard procedure to create multiple teeny tiny human beings, and then to select the one that seems most  likely to survive implantation back in the mother.

The others can be frozen, but many do not survive this process or face extermination either before  freezing or after thawing.

So we’re dealing with mass murder, but since it’s in order to gain a life in the process, it’s justified by the scientific/medical community.  (If you utilized IVF and these words are painful and convicting, I’m sorry, and I can offer you the assurance that in repentance this sin – as all others – is forgiven by the death of the Son of God, Jesus the  Christ.  I’m happy to talk further with you privately if this would be helpful, just leave me a note here.)

But now, in addition to all of these inherent risks and the lives routinely lost  in the process of conceiving via IVF, parents now are faced with determining which child to choose based on potential  health risks down the line or even based on the fact that their child may not be destined for a PhD at Harvard.

That’s a lot of pressure to put on a family.  It’s a lot of pressure for doctors to face as well.  It would be an easy thing to simply cull those less-desirable teeny tiny human beings without even mentioning it to the parents, or simply saying that they were damaged or non-viable.  There’s a lot of pressure to make some very serious decisions about who lives and dies.

Every parent wants a happy and healthy child.  They want a child full of potential who can enjoy life.  But how we define things like full, potential, enjoy, life can get really tricky.

Ultimately, I argue, this is not something designed to empower parents, but designed to empower folks who believe very firmly that the weak shouldn’t survive, that the future of our species – our next evolutionary step if you will – is only possible by eliminating less desirable people.  We can do this through myraid means already, such as voluntary or involuntary sterilization  and abortion.  Tests that have been around for years can alert parents to the risk of mental retardation or physical abnormalities in their unborn child, information that might prompt a frightened couple to opt for an abortion.  But the simpler step to bypass all that queasy moral and ethical stuff about human life is to have it all done behind the scenes.  To simply implement clinical  policies that certain genetic markers should be grounds for automatic destruction of the embryo.  Murder based on possible outcomes that I would argue are still far too fuzzy to be very confident of.

All done in neat, sterile, clinical environments with virtually no evidence or trace of the lives wiped out.

Dangerous stuff, folks.  Well-intentioned at some level, I trust.   But very, very dangerous.