British Okay Scrapping Embryos Based on Potential for Adult Illness
by Mary Rettig
May 24, 2006
(AgapePress) - - The executive director of the Christian Medical & Dental Associations (CMDA) says Great Britain has taken a dangerous and unethical step in embryo screening.The British Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority recently ruled that fertility clinics can screen out embryos that contain genes that raise the risk of cancer in adulthood. The doctors will do this by using pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, which removes a couple of cells from an eight-cell embryo.
Dr. David Stevens of the CMDA says while every doctor wants to ease suffering for his patients and prevent cancer, this move by the British is completely immoral. And further research has shown that in many cases, the move may be entirely unnecessary as well, he notes.
Stevens points to a new study that came out recently, which showed that many of these embryos which tested as abnormal at two to three days of life, once they were implanted or grown in the laboratory in culture media, subsequently tested as normal.
The researchers found that, 12 days after conception, about half of the embryos previously diagnosed as having defective genes "had actually reversed and were not abnormal anymore," the Christian doctor says. "Essentially, they repaired themselves."
Diagnosing possible adult diseases by pre-implantation genetic diagnosis is not 100 percent reliable, Stevens points out. And it is unfair, he asserts, to use such techniques to label a pre-born baby unfit to live, simply on the basis that the developing child might get cancer as an adult.
The British government may claim this new embryo-screening policy will prevent future suffering, but Stevens sees it as a dangerous step in the direction of creating government-sanctioned eugenics programs. "Eugenics," he explains, "means improving the human race by encouraging or permitting reproduction of only those with genetic characteristics judged desirable."
The CMDA spokesman feels officials at the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority are coming precariously close to playing God. "Essentially, what they're doing in laboratories is deciding who lives and who dies," he says, "and that's the same eugenics philosophy. First they started with lethal defects in England, and now we're on this slippery slope."
Stevens sees the Authority's decision to allow fertility clinics to screen-out embryos on the basis of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis as an immoral and a dangerous one. No pre-born baby, he insists, should ever have to die because of a disease the developing child may or may not get as an adult.
Mary Rettig, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
