Genetics

Genetics

Did anybody else catch this exercise in human depravity?  Are you equally disturbed by it?  Sorry, the rebroadcast is filled with one annoying AARP ad after another; but I lived through them, so you can also survive, if you have a lot of patience.  Let's take this apart.

Step One.  Several embryos are harvested, artificially inseminated, and grown in a "test tube".  In my world and life view, all of these are already living human beings, with developing human bodies and human spirits.  In other words they are complete souls, already marked with the image of God.  They belong to God, not to us.

Step Two.  At a very early stage a single cell is extracted from each of these living human beings.  Wait a minute, how many cells are involved?  We started with one --- then two, four, eight, etc.  At what point does this extraction cease to be critical?  Certainly, one cell extracted from one cell will kill the baby.  We have to believe that one cell extracted from two cells will seriously affect the developing baby.  A single cell biopsied from me is of no apparent consequence.  When and how do we know that this procedure does not cause or introduce flaws all of its own?

Step three.  The developing babies are statistically evaluated from the samples taken.  One baby is selected for implantation into the mother's womb.  Even if all the others are put into a state of perfectly preserved suspended animation of some sort or other, they are virtually being murdered.  This is not about stopping mother nature from taking her course (note the pseudo-scientific language used to sell the program).  This is about killing a child, who belongs only to God.

Step four.  The pseudo-parents/actors wrestle with the ethical/moral issues involved and emotionally draw the "correct" solution.  This is not news reporting.  This is a hard sell, disguised as science and pseudo-goodness.  All these conclusions are drawn by folks who have the ethical/moral sensitivities of a block of concrete: because it is “scientific” it is necessarily good.

The line has already been crossed.  The doctor has conspired, using his creative technology to invade living human beings; possibly damaging them with his own procedure; evaluated these babies with complicated computerized statistical routines; and on his/her own independent unilateral volition, selected one, and put the rest into an undefinable limbo.  Make no mistake, this is playing God.  This exactly what it means to play God.  This is a conspiracy to commit murder, plain and simple.

The parents have also crossed the line.  They have conspired with the doctor to murder their own children in their mad quest for the perfect child.  They agree to select one for life and neglect the rest.

Ostensibly, this is justifiable, based on the obvious fact that all of us carry genetic defects.  For the good of humanity, the inferior people are screened out, so that only an acceptable baby develops.  It’s a good thing, right?  We all ought to do it, right?  Wait a minute!

Objection One.  We have not protected babies from undeserved and unfair genetic defects and diseases.  Instead, we have contrived to murder them because of these same defects and diseases.  Moreover, the other babies not suffering with these defects and diseases are also murdered.  This is no different from the barbaric ancient practice where babies were placed at the father’s feet.  If the father picked the baby up, he/she lived.  If the father refused to recognize the baby, he/she was left to die.  Fortunately, concerned Christians stepped in to rescue many of these unwanted babies and raise them as their own.  The only difference is the age of the baby.

Objection Two.  We have not protected society from the painful care of undeserved and unfair genetic defects and diseases.  Instead, we risk the introduction of new problems, problems that may not surface for decades, or centuries.  Millennia from now, a new human defect or disease may very well surface that finds its cause here, in this procedure.  Moreover, the very things that make us precious as individuals, the characteristics that make us loveable and loved, have now been screened out, to the detriment of society.  What makes us individually precious?  Is it not the very way that pathos plays out?  If my ancestors died in painful suffering with cancer, isn’t this the very fact that indelibly implants and endears them in my memory?  This is the very thing we seek to erase: that which makes life worth living.

Objection Three.  This house of cards is constructed around a so-called, trumped-up, statistical probability: supposedly a form of breast cancer in the model.  This supposed statistical probability is then generalized into the fact that everybody has genetic defects.  Does anyone else see this logical flaw?  It is the flaw of excessive generalization.  In its reductio ad absurdum it becomes the genetic design of all human characteristics: the reduction of the human race to robotically identical non entities, devoid of individuality and lovability.  Returning to the original model: Will this unfortunate woman be less loved because she has a tragic breast cancer?  Or will she be loved all the more because of our memory of her suffering?  Would we like to see this disease eliminated?  Yes!  Find another way.

Objection Four.  Does this unfortunate young woman have the right to reject the means that God has chosen for calling her home to Himself?  She has not escaped death.  Nor have her children escaped death.  She, running away from cancer, ran in front of a speeding vehicle.  He, returning unscathed from combat, was killed by a stray bullet, fired by accident blocks away.  We cannot cheat death.  In attempting to postpone the inevitable, at what point are we found to be waging war with God?  Is life so dear that we will ignore every other value in order to cling to it?

Objection Five.  Who decides what is imperfect and inferior; or what is neither imperfect nor inferior?  Is it the doctor?  Is it the parent?  Or is it God?  If we assume that human copulation is nothing more than random chance, breeding, we will draw the wrong conclusion.  Human copulation involves more than a man and a woman.  Human copulation is a sacred act involving a man, a woman, and God Himself.

Objection Six.  It won’t work.  The doctor has cleverly disguised his discussion around the supposed existence of a disease cause by a single genetic marker, a single recessive defect.  Statistically this means that both parents must have the defect.  Bb mating with another Bb will statistically produce one BB (defect free individual), two Bb (carriers), and one bb (with the disease), which he calls 50/50.  His math is a little off: its actually 75/25.  If B and B mate, there can be no defect.  If B and b mate there can still be no defect because of the recessive trait.  If b and b mate, the defect will necessarily take place.  Still not 50/50 unless you predetermine and load the B to b population ratio.  Only when Bb mates with bb are the results, two Bb (carriers) and two bb (defects): 50/50.  All of this clouds over the fact that very few, if any diseases depend on a single genetic marker, or if markers merely render the individual susceptible to a disease, while the actual cause lies elsewhere.  In reality the genetic marker may merely indicate a susceptibility, not a necessity.  Experimentation is usually confounded by overlapping and inseparable competing causes.  Moreover, in reality, most, if not all diseases have several markers: now the math becomes unbelievably complex.  With as few as eight markers the odds could be as low as one in 65,536: indicating a susceptibility, not a certainty.  This is pseudo-science.  Genetics is still too young and too difficult to draw these conclusions with certainty.

Objection Seven.  Public editorials and news render no service to mankind when their opinions are boldly presented as sales campaigns and heart rending dramatizations.  None of these things is necessarily the Truth.  God holds the Truth, men do not.  It is not only the doctor, and the parents, who are playing God in this scenario.  The editorial and news teams have done a lot of God playing as well.  They pose themselves as disinterested parties, but they are far from it; they are advertisers promoting murder.

Not only are we doomed to fail in this process.  We, having conspired, are now saddled with the guilt of being accessories to the murder of many more babies.  In the “digital” test the sample size was one hundred.  I’m here to tell you that if the necessary digital sample size was one hundred, then the real life sample size would be on the same order.  That implies roughly ninety-nine babies murdered with every test.  This is a decision that only God has the right to make.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/breeding-out-disease-with-reproductive-genetics/