Gucci (Designer) BabiesIn 1997 the movie Gattaca presented the idea that a super class human race could develop once parents rejected the so called God child in place of genetically engineered ‘valids’. The geneticist could eliminate any perceived problems or flaws and could even decide such things as eye colour and skin colour.
The film opened with the inscription "not-so-distant future" and with recent laws changing regarding tests on embryos the reality may not be too far off.
Recently a couple living in Leeds have been allowed to select from various embryos one that has a perfect genetic match with their three year old son Zain Hashmi. Zain suffers from beta thalassaemia which can produce fatal iron levels in his blood. So far the parents have been unable to find a suitable donor for their son. Instead they have been given permission to have embryos made artificially. Any embryo that had the same genetic match as Zain could then be selected and implanted into the mother. After birth, cells can be taken from the umbilical cord which can then be used to save Zain.
In another case in America a geneticist, who will almost certainly suffer from early onset of Alzheimer’s disease, has tested several embryos and then implanted only the healthy ones into her womb.
Shannon Brownlee in an article ‘Designer Babies’ wrote of the future possibilities that selecting embryos could lead to: “One near-term possibility that many parents, if given the opportunity, will want to weed out embryos carrying genetic traits for a host of non-lethal conditions, like baldness, shyness, short stature, or homosexuality. Fertility specialists are already getting requests from prospective parents who want to know if they can be assured their embryos won't turn out to be hyperactive or gay. Today, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn would have been diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder and medicated. Tomorrow, they might not be allowed out of the petri dish.” Saving a child or future generations from illnesses seems greatly different from selecting a child who will have good looks or particular abilities. However, Peter Smith, secretary for the Evangelical division of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children said there were many dangers to this new law:
“…all these things are done a little bit at a time and they are done with the hard cases. Now this particular situation [the Hashmi’s case] is where a sibling has a particular genetic disease and needs for example a bone marrow transplant and you can use the stem cells from the umbilical cord of a child. It’s a really hard case because that sibling will probably die if you don’t allow this particular embryo to be selected. What happens is the hard cases are used to change the law and practice and it is dangerous to use hard cases to change the law.”
In reality most might be concerned about the problems that may arise, such as those explored in Gattaca, if we start genetically engineering people. However, the hard cases such as the Hashmi’s desire for their son to live are used to make laws possible. We can only feel for the family and the despair that they are going through and as such we become sympathetic to the situation and think perhaps this is the way to go. We’re told this is as far as science will go on this. But once laws are changed regarding such things we are on a slippery slope and who knows where it can lead and what effects there will be on the children born under these conditions as Peter Smith noted there has been ‘a very crucial change in why we have babies’:
“In the past people have had babies unconditionally and every child has been accepted unconditionally. Now if you do pre-implantation diagnosis, just select a particular embryo so that child can donate umbilical stem cells for a sibling yes that can definitely improve the siblings prospects for survival but we have crossed a major dividing line in how we have babies, because before we accepted babies unconditionally now we are accepting them on a condition and even non-Christian ethicists believe this is a very serious marker to go across.”
It seems there could be many problems in pursuing the idea of designer babies. The slippery slope could lead to the super human race pictured in the movie Gattaca. A race that probably will only be afforded by those that are reasonably well off and the rest of society would be far below the ‘elite’. On top of this problem the surplus embryos are generally destroyed. As Christians we believe in life from conception so because you don’t have the right genes you’ll just be killed. In the case of pre-implantation diagnosis to help a sibling, if you do happen to be the chosen one then you can live knowing that you’re not really much more than a science experiment, as Peter Smith commented: “…the whole life of the child is like an experiment and that child cannot withdraw from that experiment nor give consent” Who is to say what is good for us anyway? The bible teaches that we are wonderfully and fearfully made. We know that sin has affected our bodies to the point that we can suffer from terrible conditions, but even in these times God can draw us to him. What is more important living as long as science can enable us or looking to Jesus as our Saviour and desiring to be with him to worship in our perfect bodies? Not perfect because science has made us that way but perfect because Christ has made it so. Return to Home Page |
