Thread by kellynla.
A group representing Catholic hospitals and health care facilities in California, noting that “pressure has been especially acute” in the state to force Catholic institutions to violate their moral values, has called on the Obama Administration to give up its attempt to repeal federal “conscience clause protection for hospitals and health care workers.”
"The conscience protections contained in federal law are a civil right for all hospitals and health care workers," said William J. Cox, president of the Sacramento-based Alliance of Catholic Health Care in a statement issued yesterday. “The regulation that the Administration seeks to repeal is necessary for preserving those rights and making sure that health care workers can perform their duties without fear or intimidation."
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Thread by me.
Mr. and Mrs. Jones want a baby. They visit a fertility clinic and announce: “We want a boy—blond hair and blue eyes, please. We want him to be at least six feet tall, good at sports and have great musical ability.”
“No sweat,” the doctor says. Nine months later, baby Logan is born.
But for Logan’s parents, things don’t work out quite the way they expected. Despite his outstanding physique, Logan has no interest in sports. He likes to write poetry instead. As for music—yes, he’s good at it, his genes have seen to that—but he’d much rather spend his time designing model airplanes.
Logan’s parents are furious. They paid good money for a son who would make them proud on the athletic field and in the concert hall! Plus—the final insult—Logan dyed his blonde hair purple.
While this is not a true story, of course—but it could be soon enough. A Los Angeles fertility clinic now offers testing for “cosmetic selection.” The procedure is known as pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. It involves removing a cell from an embryo and testing it for desired physical traits.
According to Dr. Jeff Steinberg, who runs the clinic, parents can choose the sex of their baby, and also pick out junior’s hair and eye color. The babies will, of course, be free of inherited diseases. Dr. Frankenstein—I mean, Dr. Steinberg—checks for those, as well.
Dr. Gillian Lockwood, a British fertility expert, has a question for Steinberg. “What,” she wants to know, “are you going to do with all those other embryos that turn out like me to be ginger [haired] with green eyes?”
The answer is that embryos who don’t make the grade are destroyed—or sold to medical researchers. . .