Eenie, Meenie, Meiny, Moe
To begin with, I can't imagine the horror of watching your child suffer a long-term debilitating disease like the one described in this article. That's not entirely true. I can vaguely imagine it. My brother-in-law and his wife have two beautiful young boys who both have cystic fibrosis. While we have lived in different parts of the country from them for most of the boys' lives, our visits together have given us a glimpse into the daily regimen they must go through in order to keep the boys healthy and strong. They are tireless searchers for the best options for treatment and nutrition and whatever else can help the boys live long and happy lives.
It is situations like these that kick our empathy and sympathy into overdrive. Cures ought to be found. Treatments and options ought to be expanded. Suffering ought to be mitigated or eliminated. Surely there can be nothing more life affirming than seeking the best possible good of every life, regardless of the cost?
That's where things get tricky and slippery, fast. So in the above-referenced article, a British family comes to the US to undergo in vitro fertilization so that they can have a third child. That in itself would be cause for some theological questioning. The process of IVF can assist a couple in having a child, true, but at the cost of multiple lives in the forms of fertilized embryos that are generated. Many are discarded outright. Some are frozen for possible later use, though the process of freezing and thawing is itself fraught with great danger that ends up destroying many of these frozen embryos. In the quest for the embryo best likely to implant and grow, other lives are created and destroyed before they are more than a few days old.
But this situation is even trickier. It's the couple's third child that they turned to IVF for. Not because they are infertile or incapable of conceiving normally, but because they wanted - no, needed - to ensure that it wasn't just any child that was conceived, but rather a child capable of being a tissue-match for their son. While I can't speculate (based on the limited nature of the article) on how desired IVF sibling was for his own sake, what we do know is that he was definitely desired and crafted for the sake of his older brother, who suffers from a horrendous disease that required a stem cell transplant to cure him.
The article doesn't indicate whether doctors knew that a stem cell transplant would heal the boy. At the very least, I assume all other treatment options were exhausted and this was the families last hope. So they came to the US (since the UK bans the crafting or selection of IVF embryos for criteria such as a tissue match with an older sibling). Their efforts were successful. The IVF boy was born healthy, free of the disease, and a tissue match for his older sibling. Stem cells from the younger boy's umbilical cord were transplanted into his brother, resulting in what appears to be a complete curing of the disease.
Now a family of five, the parents defend their decisions and actions, seeking to deny that they crafted their child specifically to save his older brother. His mother asserts that such an accusation is completely wrong. Only it isn't. It's very accurate, even if it sounds rather cold and calculating. Which it was, on one level.
Mom insists that the younger brother is thrilled that he saved his older brother's life, and I trust that this is the case. But the ethical and moral implications ripple out quite a bit farther than whether or not this particular boy is happy with the role he played in saving his brother's life. Moving down the road towards conceiving - or growing in test tubes - human beings with particular genetic or other physical attributes needed to save the lives or improve the lives of other human beings is a dangerous road. It's yet another step in equating human life with nothing more than a collection of chemical processes, ultimately no different than a controlled chemical reaction in a test tube.
And as we further degrade the status of any given human life, we step closer to justifying any manner of atrocities - usually with the noble sounding goal of improving the standard of living for other people who already happen to be alive. Why such an action has any meaning if all human life is equivalent in it's non-specialness is a rather fundamental hiccup here. If I am a collection of chemical processes masquerading as something more, why does the maintenance of my life have any real purpose (unless of course I'm fortunate enough to be brilliant or useful or powerful or rich or any number of other very arbitrary modifiers to my chemical reaction status)? Certainly there can't be any moral or ethical imperative that would make my set of chemical reactions worthy of forcing another set of chemical reactions into existence for the sole (or nearly sole) purpose of improving or prolonging my set of chemical reactions.
All of which I'm sure would horrify this family. They had to watch one of their children suffer horribly, and they sought a means of alleviating that suffering. The emotional impulse is admirable, but the methodology is dangerously flawed. However they wish to pretty up the situation, the net result is that their second son exists as he exists specifically to foster the life of his brother. That may cause some internal angst down the line as he grows old enough to grapple with the ramifications of this information - regardless of how much he loves his brother and is loved by his family.
I think it's interesting that the nation founded on the principle that all people are created equal should be the nation that allows for this equality to be tampered with, so that it is no longer simple equality based on a created status, but now based on other criteria as well, such as usefulness or expediency.
Posted by Paul Nelson at 5/11/2011 10:46 AM 
Categories: Science, Theology, Health, Citizenship, Current Events
Categories: Science, Theology, Health, Citizenship, Current Events
Oh what a hard subject to talk about!!!! There are many parents in the CF world that go this route, to ensure that they do not have any more children with CF. There are many males with CF who are choosing this route also, as 95 % are infertile. I do not feel that it is the choice for us. I feel like the process of IVF is taking a HUGE amount of control from God. But I understand where the families are coming from who are choosing to try it.
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It is a very hard subject to talk about. And I can in no way claim to understand firsthand the emotions involved in making that choice. I can hazard some guesses regarding the thoughts that go into it, though. And the thinking is a good place to start talking, since talking doesn't often (or at least quickly) change emotional states. I'll never claim that there aren't compelling reasons why people go down these roads. But I'll offer that there are more than a few equally compelling reasons to stop and think about it - particularly from a Christian perspective.
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