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Genetic Screening For Disease And Enhancement The recent announcement of the first UK baby created with a new found product guaranteed to be free from breast cancer marks a new turn in human reproduction. While most of the attention has focused on the ability to provide a guarantee for the avoidance of a life-threatening illness, the question surrounding the therapeutic role of medicine has slid by the wayside. New technologies in human reproduction are becoming more and more removed from the principal aim to develop therapies needed to overcome human illnesses. The distraction? The ever-advancing ability to create multiple human individuals for selection and research. The effort now is not to genetically cure a human individual's pathology in the early stages of development. It is to discriminate against those individuals who carry genetic or other defects. For a relatively small investment, this new age of science and medicine has found a way to bypass the treatment of diseases altogether: create a group of siblings in a laboratory and grant life only to the few without the disease while denying life to those who may suffer a certain illness. A purely eugenic practice. However, it is not enough to stop here. Professor Julian Savulescu, Uehiro Chair of Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford just received an 800 thousand pound grant from the Wellcome Trust to further his neurological ethics theories. The center will seek to employ genetic enhancement of human individuals, such as intelligence, personality, beauty, etc. by means of the same genetic testing and selection, in an effort to surpass the imperative to overcome illness for the sake of achieving superiority. Professor Savulescu, believing that because we now have at our disposal the technology to achieve the enhancement of our species, we have a moral imperative to create and select the best child possible for living the highest quality of life. His ideal clearly departs from the therapeutic role of science and medicine, leading our culture down a slippery slope toward discriminatory eugenic practices. Though many dispute the status of personhood at the embryonic stages where these practices take place, we cannot dispute that the human embryo is a human individual with its own genetic makeup and autonomous development. The universal question, regardless of moral ascription, is whether or not the abuse, discrimination and eugenic selection of the human individual at the early stages of development will not lead to discrimination, abuse and eugenic selection of the human person at all stages of life? If we allow science to abuse the innocent individual at any stage and deny them the protection of universal human rights, how can we secure the protection of the human rights that we enjoy now? In our effort to eliminate or avoid human illness, suffering and deficiencies instead of curing them, we are on our way to eliminating those deemed by Professor Savulescu as not able to achieve the highest degree of quality living, whether family, friend or foe. Thus the popular myth that holds the embryo to be anything other than human life and consequential bearer of human rights, in effect, produces inequality and directly opposes universal human rights for all. --- Jennifer Kimball is the Executive Director of the Culture of Life Foundation. The Culture of Life Foundation is a social policy research institute that exists to reveal and present the truths about the human person at all stages of life and in all conditions. -------------------- Note -- The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, and/or philosophy of GOPUSA.
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