February 28, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:Shiloh Bucher has a good
Shiloh Bucher has a good rejoinder to those who offered the alzheimers baby as a vindication of fetal research:
The Times' take on the designer baby reads: Baby Spared Mother's Fate by Genetic Tests as Embryo. This is not technically correct. The baby actually escaped the fate of its sibling embryos who were found to be unworthy of implantation and destroyed. The egg which was fertilized to form the chosen embryo already had not inherited it's mother's faulty gene. It is incorrect to say, then, that the child which grew from that embryo was spared from the mother's fate by the screening process. It's as though you picked a black marble from a bag of whites and declared that it was your selection of it which it made it black. It was already black-- that's why you picked it. Likewise, this child was born because it did not share its mother's flaw. Had it had the bad gene it would have been destroyed with the others, and another embryo would have been implanted. That embryo would be as different from the girl which was just born as one is from one's brother or sister. All you can say is that its parents were spared the heartache of bearing a child who would develop Alzheimer's disease should it live to be forty, and to achieve this end, who knows how many embryos were created and then destroyed.
I don't have an opinion on fetal research/cloning right now; I was disturbed by this case more because it seems irresponsible, to me, to make a special effort to bring a child into this world when you're going to be too senile to parent it within ten years. Nonetheless, while this story may or may not be heartwarming, dpending on your point of view, it gets us no further on the fetal research debate. Posted by Jane Galt at February 28, 2002 3:55 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links