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.'"
