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.
Then a "direct deposit" service....
"Why must these women give in to a (purely psychological?) urge to become biological mothers?"
I don't understand it myself. I've been married 20 years and never had the desire for children, so I never had any. You should see the flack I've gotten on FR for my "selfish" decision! What posters fail to express is why it's any of their business. I guess if you don't do what the posters generally think is right in your own life, they'll let you have it, whether you have kids or not.
Natural Selection in the 21st century...
Actually, what we are witnessing is nature occurring at highly technical level.
In nature, the female always looks to mate with the best possible male to insure healthy successful offspring. Society places restrictions on this instinctive search through institutions like religion and marriage. Fertilization allows the female to bypass societal norms and support their primeval instincts to improve the herd.
Yeah, right.....I've got one of those "genetic reductionisms" for a niece......believe me.....it's NOT an improvement.....even though her "mother" got to go shopping through a book to pick the hair color, eye color, race, etc. of the sperm donor.....she couldn't pick the Intelligence Level, however.....or the strength of the breeding "stock." I wouldn't call it a "triumph."
"I wouldn't call it an "improvement." is what I meant to say in the last sentence....
To be fair, without stuff like this, "Pennsylvania College Professors" might become extinct! ;-)
I don't see a problem with this.
I prefer people doing this than having abortions.
I agree. I love the fact that people are seeking out to have children. They are going to be extremely loved because they are clearly extremely wanted. Plus who is to say that they are not made by God's love. I think that was a piss poor sentence in the story.
how special for you....that you like to ride around on vehicle that makes one look like a monkey humping a football.
Sit up straight and ride like a man!
Europe and Asia does NOTHING RIGHT!
The flack has all been here, pretty much. My parents thought it was my husband's and my business if we had babies or not, and my husband's parents didn't really take an interest one way or the other.
There was no pressure to be grandparents from our parents; thank heaven they had lives of their own and didn't live through us with the goal of "being grandparents".
"For this to actually be "nazi-like" government would have to be behind it..."
The Nazis were a movement and a held to a philosophy before they became a government. "In the beginning was the word..." and that philosophy was a threat. This is indeed Nazi-like. Here too traditions and religious scrupples are set aside.
Of course the net effect of the Nazi movement was that the Germans lost a generation of men, 200,000 German women were impregnated and produced offspring through rape by Soviet forces, and the German race was weakened instead of strengthened.
The "I want a baby without a husband but want a high IQ doner with an athletic physique" is quite different from "I want to find a handsome intelligent man and marry him". One option produces a child without a father in the home.
If the woman gets the perfect sperm, the results may not be so remarkable because she is also contributing genetics and she was apparently not competitive in the free market economy of dating (or why the need for doners?). Probably she is quite unattractive. Perhaps the child will take after Mom. Maybe Mom should have viewed the child's beginnings through the same human value system as Dr. Mengele.
It's a fair description of human mating patterns since the beginning of time.
So a woman isn't allowed to reject a suitor because she thinks said suitor would make a poor father, or has some physical trait she'd rather her kids not inherit?
Some people have selected mates based on their perceived genetic material for a long time. All the new technology is doing is allowing people to make the same selections without actually having to live with the person. It's cold, crass and calculating, but it's nothing really new.
Strawman.
Denying that there is an absolute right to one thing does not mean affirming that there is an absolute obligation to its opposite.
Never said anything about an obligation. A person has a right to choose who to have a child with. Whether their method of having a child with that person is new methods like artificial insemination or the traditional method of getting married and having babies is immaterial, there is an absolute right to say "no I don't want to have a child with this person".
If someone is not permitted to reject a suitor, as in your hypothetical, then they are clearly obliged to accept him.
If a person doesn't have a right to reject a potential mate, which you're saying they don't, then that calls into question the entire concept of voluntary marriages. How can you have voluntary marriages and not have an absolute right to reject a mate?
This is a non sequitur.
"He embezzled millions from the Savings & Loan."
"I prefer people doing this than drowning puppies."
"She had sex with her 12-year-old student."
"I prefer people doing this than installing defective carbon monoxide detectors."
"They kidnap Ukrainian orphans and sell them into slavery in Germany."
"I prefer people doing this than driving those gas-guzzling SUV's."
This is becoming ridiculous.
I never said anything of the kind, not even remotely.
What I did actually say was that that it is a preposterous hyperbole to assert that there is an absolute individual right to select anyone one wants as the fellow parent of one's children.
One's choices of fellow parent are obviously limited: one has no right to select another person's spouse as their fellow parent, for one glaringly obvious example.
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