WASHINGTON, DC -- May 1999 Researchers at the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility at Cornell University announced in today's Journal of the American Medical Association that they can now determine whether test-tube embryos carry the gene that causes sickle cell anemia. The contention is that those embryonic children carrying the sickle cell gene may then be destroyed at the request of the parents.
The process is called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), and allows researchers to study the genetic traits of embryos before implantation, and discard the young life which is predisposed toward the disease.
American Bioethics Advisory Commission Director Fr. Joseph Howard says the procedure is no different than an abortion. "The only distinction between this and abortion is that the killing is occurring outside the womb," said Howard. It's exactly the same thing Hitler implemented in his eugenics program in the 1930s -- kill the ones deemed to be less than perfect.
"These researchers would be 'helping' parents decide that if they don't want to deal with the stress of having an 'imperfect' child, they don't have to. They simply make several innocent lives in a test tube, and then pick the one that won't have sickle cell anemia. Basically they'll decide whose life is worth living and whose is not," he said.
Dr. Oswaldo Castro, the director of the Sickle Cell Disease Center at Howard University in Washington, also disagrees with the procedure. He has treated adults with sickle cell anemia and said, "it's difficult for me to make a judgment and say 'well, this one should never have been born.'"
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Source: The Pro-Life Infonet, a daily compilation of pro-life news and information. To subscribe, send the message "subscribe" to: infonet-digest-request@prolifeinfo.org. Infonet is sponsored by Women and Children First (http://www.prolifeinfo.org/wcf). For more pro-life info visit http://www.prolifeinfo.org and for questions or additional information email ertelt@prolifeinfo.org