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What
would you be willing to do to save a child’s life? What if it were your own
child? For most of us the quick answer is “anything,” but “anything” is a lot
more complicated than it used to be.
About
a decade ago a California couple made headlines by conceiving a child for the
purpose of bearing a bone marrow donor for their teen-aged daughter, a leukemia
victim. Beating 1-in-4 odds, the baby was a perfect match for her sister, who
recovered with the help of the transplant. The story ends happily, with the
girl now grown and married.
The notion of conceiving a child as a donor raised a debate among medical
ethicists, who in that quaint era served to help patients and medical
professionals navigate between what one can do and what one should do. Although
the baby was not harmed beyond the needle prick to extract a few cells, where
would this newly cracked door lead in a time of rapidly advancing medical
knowledge?
To the
the Reproductive Genetics Institute of Chicago, it turns out, where doctors helped a Colorado
couple create 12 embryos in hopes of producing a donor for the pair’s 6-year-old
daughter. Later, doctors at the University of Minnesota transplanted umbilical cord blood cells from the baby
to the girl, who suffers from a rare genetic disease that prevents her body from
making its own bone marrow. Without a suitable donor her doctors say the girl
would have died by age 35, perhaps much sooner
The embryos were created in a lab and screened for presence of the disease and
suitability as donors. One of the embryos was found to carry the malady and
dispatched; a second was implanted into the mother. The rest were frozen.
Though it was not stated in the media, which likes to find polite euphemisms for
these things, the couple presumably does not intend to have ten more children
and will eventually kill the remaining embryos or allow them to become inviable.
The director of the university’s Center for Bioethics acknowledged that genetic
screening might be misused but feels this case shows it can be positive. “A
healthy child can also save the life of a sick sibling,” he said. “And that’s
all to the good.”
But what of the embryos that weren’t implanted? Last year I wrote of a proposal
to allow the euthanization of handicapped children by Dr. Peter Singer, holder
of an endowed bioethics professorship at Princeton University. An advocate of
“personhood” for great apes, Singer has also said that “the life of a newborn
baby is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee,” and that
“killing a defective infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person.”
At worst, Singer was praised by faint damnation. Then-presidential candidate
Peter Forbes, a Princeton alumnus and trustee, withdrew his financial support
and handicapped rights groups staged protests, but Singer’s peers barely raised
a collective eyebrow.
Dear Lord, if my family ever has to make life or death decisions for me may
there be no ethicist in the house.
The
role of the profession has morphed from gatekeeper to apologist, part of a
broader drive to remove moral guideposts from society at large. You know the
chant: “What’s wrong for you might be right for me,” “Who is anyone to tell
someone else what to do?”, “Judge not!”, yadda, yadda. Yet if that’s all there
is to it, why do we need paid professional advocates except as a balm to the
conscience? People have generally proven to be quite capable of making their
own excuses.
Clichéd as it may sound my heart truly does go out to the Colorado couple and
their daughter. Doctors say the transplant appears to have worked and the girl
will likely be released by the time this prints. I wish her a complete
recovery.
But dying along with those 11 embryos is another piece of our humanity. This is
eugenics, no more and no less, and all the apologists in the world can’t change
it.
© 1997 – 2002 Brent Morrison
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