Within 24 hours I found myself thinking about ethics, parental decisions, my personal convictions and embryos. There was this article in the Tulsa World that morning. My reading of the story is that after parents in India discover the gender of a soon to be born fetus, they may or may not decide to abort the pregnancy depending upon the gender of the child. That article can offer more insight into the cultural, political and religious influences and pressures Indian parents face. Christians reading the article might find themselves morally offended by the decision to abort a child because of her gender (and rightly so) but the pressures of their culture and location are incredibly real.
Later that same day I caught this story on NPR. The thrust of the story again is simple – parents are pre-screening embryos who may or may not mature into full-term babies for tendencies or predispositions to disease. Some of that seems logical – if you have a choice, would you choose to have a child who will suffer from a fatal disease early in life, or one who instead only faces the routine allergies and colds?
The technology driving all this is called PGD preimplantation genetic diagnosis. Here technology gives parents opportunity to screen future children for certain health risks. Certainly the use of this technology is already controversial. You don’t have to think or listen hard to hear someone already in the background picking an argument claiming this will lead to parents picking their child’s hair color, athletic ability or shoe size. Add to that all the arguments people already get into surrounding in vitro fertilization and viewing abortion as a mother’s choice.
Part of what strikes me about this is the multiple layers of conflicting and changing logic wrapped up in these kinds of discussions. In India, abortion is legal, reflecting at least some sense of an idea that abortion is a woman’s choice, a woman’s right. Yet it is the choice of women and their husbands that is causing the uproar and alarm. Choice can work against society, can’t it?
Choice for parents using PGD is involved here, but it assumes that we can accurately predict disease (at terribly high cost I assume) and that we should be doing so. There’s all kinds of religious and philosophical discussion embedded there, right?
Nothing confuses us and stirs up more passion and controversy like mixing together parental passions, personal choice, my own sense of self-will and our amazing fear of suffering.
