Jul. 22nd, 2004

ramtops: (Default)
I was listening to the Moral Maze on the consistently excellent Home Service last night (and aren't we lucky to have it?). The subject was "designer babies", a term I find irritating. Almost as irritating as "saviour babies", which is another one.

I loathe and detest the idea of parents deliberately conceiving a child to in some way "mend" an existing child. I think that having to live with the burden of knowledge that you would not have been born had your sibling not required something from you must be dreadful. And what happens if it doesn't work? - if the sibling still dies, and your birth has effectively been for nothing.

I don't like genetic engineering. I don't like test tube babies and stem cell research and 50-odd year old women giving birth and ovum harvesting and all that stuff. I think we are letting stuff out of Pandora's box, and I wonder where it will end.

and I think it's because our society now rejects illness and death. If you have a child with a genetic disease, that's a tragedy. If you can't have children and you want them, that's a tragedy. I don't mean to minimise or trivialise this, truly I don't. I can't begin to imagine how appalling it must be to find yourself in this situation.

but we don't have a right to children, or to healthy children, and I think that our society is wrong to let people think that they do.

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