Posted on 06/01/2006 6:55:41 AM PDT by Mr. Silverback
Note: This commentary may not be suitable for young children. Please use parental discretion.
Leann Mischel, a Pennsylvania college professor, was ready to have a second child. And she wanted the new baby to have the same father her son did. The problem was that Mischel had no idea who he was: The father of her son was “Donor 401” at a sperm bank. And the bank had sold out of Donor 401’s genetic material.
But Mischel was in luck. As the Washington Post put it, Carla Schouten, another sperm-bank mother from San Jose, had “the gift of a lifetime for Mischel”—“an extra vial of the father’s sperm chilling in her doctor’s refrigerator.” She gave it to Mischel, who used it to father her second child.
This is a chilling example of the Brave New World of babymaking—one that puts human reproduction into the world of commerce.
Increasingly, men and women are buying and selling eggs and sperm; other women rent out their wombs for a fee. Egg donors with Ivy League educations and sperm donors with doctoral degrees can charge far more for their products. You have to wonder: How long will it be before the most popular “donor fathers” and “egg mothers” decide to cut out the middleman and sell their products on Ebay? And then imagine the child of that transaction—one who finds out that Dad sold his genetic material to a total stranger because she was the highest bidder.
And what about the grandparents? How sad that the parents of men who sell their sperm may have dozens of grandchildren they will never meet. And what if grandparents decide to locate these genetic grandchildren?
There’s also the eugenics element. People who buy genetic products want the best that money can buy. For example, the man who fathered the babies of Leann Mischel and Carla Schouten, and of nine other women, is 6-foot-4, good at sports, has a master’s degree, and is of German descent. It all sounds a bit like the plot of a creepy novel—one that involves neo-Nazis trying to spread the seeds of a new “Master Race.”
What we’re witnessing is the triumph of genetic reductionism, which treats people as little more than the product of their DNA. There is a growing group of scientists, like Steven Pinker at MIT, who promote an alien worldview called evolutionary psychology: that our genes actually program us. In this view, the human body is not a gift from God but a purely physical object, a commodity bought and sold—or cut up for parts, as with embryonic stem-cell research.
But the Bible teaches that humans—far from being mere collections of DNA or reproductive machines—are made in the image of God and that we find our ultimate identity and worth in reflecting our Creator.
Some European countries have banned donor insemination of single women and the anonymous donation of sperm and eggs. And we ought to be doing exactly the same thing here.
This broadcast brings to a close our two-week series about the “War on the Weak.” You need to explain to your neighbors what is at stake in the clash between the biblical worldview and many of the alien worldviews we have been discussing during this series. As is so clear from today’s subject, genetic reductionism, what is at stake here is nothing less than the question of what it means to be human.
This is part ten of ten in the “War on the Weak” series.
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I don't see a problem with this.
I prefer people doing this than having abortions.
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It certainly beats buying and selling embryonic stem cells.
(deftly stolen from The Simpsons)
"And she wanted the new baby to have the same father her son did."
I've got news for her; Her son doesn't have a "father".
He has a "sperm donor" and that's all that anonymous male will ever be.
I'm somehow missing the connection you're making. How is an abortion the alternative to buying sperm or eggs?
For that matter I don't see abortion as an alternative to anything and can't understand when it is used as an tool in an argument where we are supposed to choose something we disagree with--in order to prevent more people choosing abortion, as if they could not have chosen to do better in the first place and can't clean up their mess without committing some further wrong.
But in this instance, I'm just trying to understand how it factors in to your objection to the author of the article ranting against the selling of sperm and eggs.
There is so much wrong with this picture.
I say to Chuck Colson exactly what I say to Michael Moore -- if you think Europe is so much better than the United States of America, MOVE THERE ALREADY, and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
Isn't this what MySpace is for?
I'm just pointing out that if anybody wants to make an issue about this, it is a far lesser moral infraction than having an abortion.
Shopping for what one might consider superior or preferable genetic material is pretty much a crap shoot, so I don't see this as any particular kind of threat to the valuation of human life.
Thus, being indignant over this gene shopping, as the author seems to be, is pointless. I'd rather spend my energy on the real issue involving procreative control, which is abortion on demand.
Shopping for what one might consider superior or preferable genetic material is an absolute individual right.
WHY?
I didn't say it wasn't. I just pointed out that:
1) it is a crap shoot... you never know what you're going to get, except that it will fall somewhere within certain parameters. very broad, flexible parameters.
2) reproductive selection on this level poses no threat to the valuation of human life. The miracle of life is the same regardless of how it comes about.
Colson manages to combine the worst impulses of the Religious Right (their version of Big Brotherism) and the Religious Left (class warfare).
"Colson manages to combine the worst impulses of the Religious Right (their version of Big Brotherism) and the Religious Left (class warfare)."
No, Colson is saying that Nazi-like thinking of humans as only things (or good genetic material is wrong). Thinking of "fathers" as mere sperm doners is also wrong.
Having a world where these bred-for-brain-and-body MIT types cannot be sure that they are not marrying their half sister/brother because of anoymous sperm donations and no true family tree is also a problem.
I'm all for constraining fertility services to married women, but considering Europe's birthrate, I'm not so sure the latter is a good idea. For some happily-married women, egg donation is their only hope of having a baby at all. There are two usual reasons, by far the most common of which is age. IMO there should be an age limit for any fertility services as well as a limit to the number of eggs from a single donor. Here in California, my wife (an infertility nurse) is seeing women in their 50s!
As to adoption, my guess is that the bulk in Europe are Arab kids, for which an indigenous family may be at considerable future risk.
Huh? I assume you mean that they're trying to become pregnant? That is too wacko, even for CA.
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