Tag IVF

The False Idol of Desiring Healthy Children

Ed

Three parent embryos, that is, embryos with three genetic parents…wait a minute…how can a child have three genetic parents?…what does this mean? The technology is not new, it’s been around for years. What is new is that the British government voted last week to allow this type method to be used on human embryos.

Reading the comments and the letters to the editor in the Telegraph (UK newspaper), you can see the arguments going back and forth: one side says this is a “playing God” while the other side accuses Christians of being “uncaring” towards childless parents or ignorant of science. To (hopefully) clarify things a little, I’ll explain what one of these three embryo processes entails.

The first thing to understand is that in the area surrounding the nucleus of an embryo exists what is called mitochondrial DNA. We’ve long been told that our DNA comes from our mother and our father and that all the genetic material needed to create you was contained in the sperm and the ovum. But there’s more than just the genetic material in the nucleus; we now know that the mitochondrial DNA in the embryo directly affects the DNA in the nucleus, thus, if unhealthy mitochondria is present, then genetic diseases or birth defects will be passed into the nucleus DNA.

So, what’s the technique for creating three parent embryos and why all the brouhaha? You start with the parents’ embryo that has unhealthy mitochondria. In parallel, you get a donor embryo with healthy mitochondria. Obviously, these are all created via in vitro fertilization (IVF), which presents it own set of ethical issues—such as creating more than you need and leaving some in frozen storage (cryopreservation), or rejecting embryos based on a pre-implantation genetic diagnosis that points to a genetic disease being present, or tossing out the embryo that is the “wrong” sex.

In step 2, you remove the nucleus from the parents’ embryo as well as removing the nucleus from the donor embryo. The donor embryo nucleus is destroyed (i.e., killed—a human life is ended). In step 3, you put the parents’ nucleus into the donor’s denucleated embryo. The nucleus continues to develop and you (hopefully) get a healthy baby.

Here’s a simple graphic from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority that shows one way that a three parent embryo can be created.

The process for creating a three parent embryo. Source: Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority

The process for creating a three parent embryo. Source: Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority

Don’t forget that you probably won’t do this to just one embryo because you want to increase the chance of success. Just as in the regular IVF process, multiple three parent embryos will likely be created, and several of them will either be tossed due to genetic deficiencies that crop up after step 3 or kept in limbo through cryopreservation.

In the discussions I’ve seen so far, no one has decried the killing of the donor’s embryo, which is a human life being sacrificed for the idol of having a healthy baby. All the supporters merely point out that either: a) I should be able to have a baby (or a healthy baby) if I want to; or b) why don’t you want to help these poor men and women who can’t have a baby (or a healthy baby). The fact that you have to purposely end a human life in order to have that healthy baby is what’s fundamentally wrong with this procedure. One life is deemed unworthy of life and it is being ended and discarded simply so that another, more “fitting,” life may continue.

Desiring healthy children is not, in and of itself, a false idol. But when we start doing whatever it takes to ensure that we have healthy children, including ending other human life, then it has become an idol.

What does that say about us as a society?

Updated: February 10, 2015 at 11:48 a.m. EST

The Nazi Plan Step 2

Ed

This is part 4 of my thoughts from The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide by Robert Jay Lifton (click here to see it on Amazon.com)  Click here to read part 3.

The second step of the Nazi plan that Dr. Lifton identified was the killing of “impaired” children in hospitals. It started innocently enough, midwives and physicians were asked to completed reports at the time of birth. The first reports asked for information where “‘serious hereditary diseases’ were ‘suspected’: idiocy and mongolism (especially when associated with blindness and deafness); microcephaly; hydrocephaly; malformations of all kinds, especially of limbs, head, and spinal columns; and paralysis, including spastic conditions.”(52)

Children who were labelled with a hereditary disease were continually evaluated until they eventually arrived in special wards “whose chiefs and prominent doctors were known to be politically reliable and ‘positive’ toward the goals of the Reich Committee.'”(53) The children were eventually killed in those wards.

Why did parents allow this to happen to their children? How can someone convince a parent that it would be better to kill his child than to let the child live? They used the idea where healing and killing were reversed. Lifton writes (54):

A doctor could tell a parent that “it might be necessary to perform a surgical operation that could possibly have an unfavorable result,” or explain that “the ordinary therapy employed until now could no longer help their child so that extraordinary therapeutic measures have to be taken.” Dr. Heinze, who used such phrases with parents, explained in court testimony that there had been truth to what he said: “A very excitable child . . . completely idiotic . . . could not be kept   quiet with the normal dose of sedatives,” so that “an overdose . . . had to be used in order to . . . avoid endangering itself through its own restlessness.” At the same time, “we physicians know that such an overdose of sedative, for children usually luminal . . . could cause pneumonia . . . and that this is virtually incurable.”

“Horrible,” you think to yourself. “Unconscionable,” you suggest. What if you were told that this happens everyday today in countries like the United States and the United Kingdom? What if you were told that anywhere between 85 to 92 percent of the babies diagnosed with Downs Syndrome in the U.S. were aborted? (Click here, here, or here for more information.) What if you were told that during the in vitro fertilization procedure, preimplantation genetic diagnosis is conducted on the embryo and those with Down Syndrome or some other genetic disease were discarded? (Click here for a recent article.)

Make no mistake, step 2 of the Nazi plan is alive and well as we abort babies or discard embryos just because they have some sort of genetic disease.

And don’t forget about making killing sound like healing. For example, how do pro-aborts talk about abortions and abortion-inducing drugs? They are considered as part of women’s healthcare. Opponents of abortion or mandatory insurance coverage for possible abortion-inducing drugs (e.g. Ella, Plan B, morning after pill) are vilified by the media and by pro-aborts as not caring for women’s health.

And how do the supporters of physician assisted suicide get it legalized? By saying this is a medical treatment that will help end the suffering of the patient. In physician assisted suicide, the person wanting to die gets a prescription that basically is an overdose of painkillers or sedatives. Does that sound familiar?

Yes, the tactics that the Nazis employed are still in use by those who want society to embrace death as a cure.

Update July 19, 2012.