Somebody has to!
Posted on 09/03/2006 1:55:46 PM PDT by Coleus
As Chad Kingsbury watches his daughter playing in the sandbox behind their suburban Chicago house, the thought that has flashed through his mind a million times in her two years of life comes again: Chloe will never be sick.
Not, at least, with the inherited form of colon cancer that has devastated his family, killing his mother, her father and her two brothers, and that he too may face because of a genetic mutation that makes him unusually susceptible.
By subjecting Chloe to a genetic test when she was an eight-cell embryo in a petri dish, Mr. Kingsbury and his wife, Colby, were able to determine that she did not harbor the defective gene. That was the reason they selected her, from among the other embryos they had conceived through elective in vitro fertilization, to implant in her mother’s uterus.
Prospective parents have been using the procedure, known as preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or P.G.D., for more than a decade to screen for genes certain to cause childhood diseases that are severe and largely untreatable.
Now a growing number of couples like the Kingsburys are crossing a new threshold for parental intervention in the genetic makeup of their offspring: They are using P.G.D. to detect a predisposition to cancers that may or may not develop later in life, and are often treatable if they do.
For most parents who have used preimplantation diagnosis, the burden of playing God has been trumped by the near certainty that diseases like cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anemia will afflict the children who carry the genetic mutation that causes them.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
We're talking about a HUMAN BEING, no less human than anyone on this planet who has been born, just at a different stage of development. If you destroy this *clump of cells* you are killing a human being.
Somebody has to!
>>Your fingernails COULD go on to become clones of you if they were processed and implanted in a womb.
Fingernails are not live cells, they are produced by Nail beds that are alive, they would contain DNA, but lots and lots of work before you can grow anything useful from them (Try starting with skin cells, or better yet adult stem cells.)
> What exactly IS a "superior" human being?
A human that is capable of, and successful at, reproducing the greatest number of equally reproduction-successful offspring.
This means that the CHinese will probably be seen as the most successful type of human. They breed rapidly *and* are not afraid of removing genetic diseases from their gene code.
Like it or not, a refusal to consider medical advances that strengthen your offsprings genetic code will lead to your offspring being weaker and fewer in number. Breeding a race of slaves, in effect.
> We're talking about a HUMAN BEING
We're talking about a dozen cells. We're arguing over whether they are, in fact, legally-protected "human beings."
Not quite, because they're not giving those other embryos, their own kids, a chance at life because they can't be assured that their lives may not be the best they can have. Who can ever be assured of that?
Nothing wrong with "considering medical advances that strengthen your offsprings genetic code" as long as other humans aren't killed in either developing or implementing the technology that will do so. It's called ETHICS (and not Peter Singer's).
> Not currently protected, but they should be so protected, because they WILL be human.
Errrr.... no. That's precisely the problem: They *won't* be human. They are not being *made* to be human. They are being made to be weeded through.
> Once the process is initiated, the biochemical result is inevitable--a fully functional human being.
Once again: point to a fully functional human being (I'd settled for a ten-pound baby) brought up in a test tube... not implanted in a womb.
> Nothing wrong with "considering medical advances that strengthen your offsprings genetic code" as long as other humans aren't killed in either developing or implementing the technology that will do so.
By that logic, no new medicines, surgical techniques or genetic technologies will be developed, as they all involve the substantial risk of death.
Both the Chinese and lawyers *love* that. Lawyers will sue, sue, sue, and the Chinese will watch the west fail to advance at the same rate. We'll soon be awash in geneticallty defective lawyers and genetically superior Chinese.
> It's called ETHICS
What you support isn't *ethics.* It's *arbitrary* *decisions.*
It's OK to pursue a 'master race' as long as you're only killing babies....../sarcasm
This reminds me of one of the letter writing exercises I found on pro-abort web pages some years back.
The aborting mother was to write a letter to the soul of her aborted human fetus, explaining why it was better that the fetus was killed. The non-mother was to assure the fetus that they would meet someday in heaven.*
The pro-aborts certainly lack logic.
They'll say the fetus has a soul when it suits their argument and then turn around and say the fetus has no human soul.
*I can imagine the hospital personnel who killed the New Orleans patients are writing letters to their dead victims right now.
> strengthen one's genetic code with regard to which environment?
The environemnt that says that cancer and Parkinson's and whatnot are bad.
> IVF, embryonic stem cell research, cloning, and human genetic engineering all need to be banned outright for the long term good of our species.
Riiiiight. And then we can get rid of chemotherapy and glasses, too.
Your whole paragraph is wonderfully written.
My point which is crystal clear is that just because I know Singer to be a madman extremist doesn't mean that ne isn't influencing many people. He is influencing them, and the extremist so-called moral relativist philosophy he teachers (so-called because it is actually not relative at all) is influencing millions around the world. He's just taking it to its logical end.
I really don't understand why environment is an intrinsic quality of humanness and should be used as a test for humanity. It seems to me you are using an external variable to the system you are trying to define to define it. But hey, when your ethics are all situational and you're a moral relativist, whatever make you feel good. If it feels good, do it.
It's funny, orionblamblam, how you talk about the Chinese outbreeding us, when the nihilistic, hedonistic lifestyle you are advocating has lead to the drop in birthrate in the West and will lead to its destruction.
But whatever, hey, go suck on your bong some more.
Yes. Word tricks by pro-aborts don't change reality.
What an intriguing idea. Granting legal protection to an unfertilized egg.
Is it made of gold or something?
They conceived multiple children, selected the healthiest one, and murdered the rest. That's f**king sick (pardon my French).
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