My good friend Chelsea Zimmerman at Reflections of a Paralytic has interviewed me for Support a Catholic Speaker Month. It was our first time out using Skype and doing an on-line interview so the sound isn't always the best and my head is gigantic (note to self: sit back from the camera) but all in all I think we did a great job. Check it out:
"TMI! Mom. TMI!" I hear that phrase a lot with a couple of teenagers in my house. TMI, of course, is short for Too Much Information.
A new study is showing that there is such a thing as TMI in prenatal testing. Now I am a proponent of prenatal genetic testing when it is appropriate for the health and well-being of the child. I think it is a powerful tool that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that a distinct human life is growing inside the womb. Just because abortion-on-demand (the real killer of the unborn) is the law of the land does not mean prenatal testing is inherently evil.
But there is such a thing as too much information, especially if that information has no clinical value. There is a lot about genetics that remains a mystery. Just because a genetic anomaly is found does not mean doctors know what that anomaly means if anything.
A new type of genetic testing called micro-array testing looks at a person's entire genome (all of their DNA) looking for abnormalities. It is a powerful tool for doctors who have a child with unexplained developmental delay or other undiagnosed problems.
But for an unborn child, a micro-array analysis may reveal genetic abnormalities that have no clinical significance, meaning that scientists do not know if these genetic anomalies will cause problem or what those problems might be. Not all chromosomal differences cause disease.
And telling mom about her child's results that have uncertain clinical significance just makes her stressed out and anxious. Researchers at Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania asked mothers who got ambiguous results through micro-array how they felt about them. The moms called the results "toxic knowledge."
"Biotechnology is one of a suite of new intimate technologies which are well on the way to empowering people to enhance themselves and their progeny by giving them stronger bodies, longer and healthier lives, and smarter brains. Certainly technologies dealing with birth, death, and the meaning and purpose of life need protection from meddling by others who, however democratically, would force their visions of the good on the rest of us."
"So let's say baby Sophie has a state-of-the-art gene job; her parents paid for the proteins discovered by say, 2005 that, on average, yielded 10 extra IQ points. By the time Sophie is five, though, scientists will doubtless have discovered ten more genes linked to intelligence. Now anyone with a platinum card can get 20 IQ points, not to mention a memory boost and a permanent wrinkle-free brow. So by the time Sophie is twenty-five and in the job market, she's already more or less obsolete - the kids coming out of college just plain have better hardware.
The vision of one's child as a nearly useless copy of Windows 95 should make parents fight like hell to make sure we never get started down this path. But the vision gets lost easily in the gushing excitement about "improving" the opportunities for our kids."
There is a pervasive misconception that prenatal genetic testing along with abortion "cures" or "treats" genetic disease. Since a child is not born with a genetic disease, somehow the disease is "cured." But killing babies in the womb with a genetic disease doesn't treat anything. It just gets rid of the people with the disease. The disease itself still remains uncured.
This abortion-centered approach to "treating" genetic disease is completely wrong-headed. If this was the approach taken with cancer, we would round up everyone with cancer, euthanize them, and then say we "treated" or "cured" cancer. Meanwhile the mystery of how to actually beat cancer would remain hidden.
And yet eugenic abortion seems to be the "treatment" course of choice these days. But this approach is not going to work because there will always be people born with genetic disease. You may "eradicate" the defective gene in one population by killing all the fetuses that carry it, but it may pop up somewhere else with an as yet undetected mutation, leaving those born with the disease still without a real treatment.
This story about Tay-Sachs disease is one example. Tay-Sachs is a genetic disease thought to only occur in those of Jewish decent. That was until three babies of Irish decent were born with it in the Philly Area. From CBS News:
Tay-Sachs disease is widely known as a genetic disorder among Jews, but a new study is exploring the risk in another group: The Irish. Genetic testing is routine for potential parents of Jewish descent to identify the risk for the rare but fatal disorder that often kills children before their 5th birthday. But after three recent cases of Tay-Sachs turned up in the Irish population in the Philadelphia area, it got Einstein Medical Center’s director of clinical genetics Dr. Adele Schneider wondering. “It raised the question to me, ‘What is the carrier rate for Tay-Sachs in the Irish population?’ because we always test Jewish people for it, and never test the Irish.” Einstein is launching a program to screen 1,000 people of with at least three of four Irish grandparents, to try to quantify the risk for Tay-Sachs.
So we can focus on making sure no one with genetic disease is ever born, a completely impossible task, or we can focus on actually curing the disease. Which one seems like the better approach?
New Scientist claims that Giuseppe Vatinno became the world's first transhumanist to be elected as a member of the a parliament. Giuseppe Vatinno's platform? "Becoming less human is not necessarily a negative thing..." From New Scientist:
Why do you think it is important to have a transhumanist politician? Politics is the motor of society, so to bring the battle forward it is important to have a political dimension. I have opposed Italy's "Law 40" that places limits on assisted procreation and have been pushing for more nanotechnology in energy and environmental technology. Is transhumanism more allied with left- or right-wing politics? In the UK and the US recently, it has been closer to the left, probably because left-wing themes such as bioethics are important to transhumanists at the moment. But economically, the movement probably leans slightly more to the right. Freedom is very important in transhumanism, leading to a focus on individuals and free enterprise.
Is there a conflict with religion? In my opinion, no. Transhumanism does tend to avoid recourse to an external deity and, in fact, most adherents are materialists. But there are also quite a few Hindu and Buddhist transhumanists, and even some Mormons.
Both from Slate'sHow To Buy a Daughter, a look at gender selection in artificial reproductive technologies:
“My husband and I stared at our daughter for that first year. She was worth every cent. Better than a new car, or a kitchen reno.”
--Megan Simpson on using IVF and preimplantation genetic diagnosis to ensure she had a girl
“It’s high-tech eugenics. If you’re going through the trouble and expense to select a child of a certain sex, you’re encouraging gender stereotypes that are damaging to women and girls. …What if you get a girl who wants to play basketball? You can’t send her back.”
-- Marcy Darnovsky, director of the Center for Genetics and Society
In everything there is the Hollywood version, and then there is the reality. Unfortunately these days no one seems to be able to tell the difference. Which is why I find NBC's "The New Normal" so disturbing.
"The New Normal" depicts a gay couple hiring a surrogate to carry a child for them. With lines sugar-coating the business transaction like, "A family is a family and love is love," and "[The surrogate's] just like an easy bake oven, except with no legal rights to the cupcake," the whole of America will be getting the warm-fuzzies just thinking about how great surrogacy is for everyone involved. The sweet, doe-eyed, single mother will get money to make her bio daughter's life better and the loving gay couple will get to shop for baby clothes. (I think I feel a tear coming on...never mind...something my kid threw just hit me in the eye.)
But in the Hollywood version there will be one voice missing. "The New Normal" will likely ignore the one voice that should be heard above all the others. The one voice that will tell you that "The New Normal" is far from normal and should never be considered normal. Continue reading at Creative Minority Report >>
Epigenetics is a game changer. What is epigenetics? It is a field of study that looks at how and why genes are turned on and off. Scientists are discovering that our genetics are not simply determined by the sequence of DNA we inherit from our parents. We also can inherit their pattern of gene expression; which of their genes are turned on or off. Gene expression can be influenced by environment: what we eat, our level of stress, whether we exercise, our exposure to toxins. And modern science is telling us that the changes in gene expression that occur because of the way we choose to live our lives, can be inherited not just by our children, but also by our grandchildren.
We have always known how important it was for our mother to eat healthy and live in a healthy environment. What epigenetics is telling us is that it was also important for our health that our grandmother did the same. Why? Because your mother's egg that was fertilized by your father's sperm began developing while your mother was in her mother's womb. So your grandmother's diet and environment likely influences your overall health today.
Scientists are discovering the same about the diet and environment of men, who naturally produce sperm their entire lives. The New York Times has a piece called "Why Fathers Really Matter" highlighting the importance of epigenetics and cleaning living for men:
Doctors have been telling men for years that smoking, drinking and recreational drugs can lower the quality of their sperm. What doctors should probably add is that the health of unborn children can be affected by what and how much men eat; the toxins they absorb; the traumas they endure; their poverty or powerlessness; and their age at the time of conception. In other words, what a man needs to know is that his life experience leaves biological traces on his children. Even more astonishingly, those children may pass those traces along to their children....
The best-known example of the power of nutrition to affect the genes of fathers and sons comes from a corner of northern Sweden called Overkalix. Until the 20th century, Overkalix was cut off from the rest of the world, unreachable by road, train or even, in wintertime, boat, because the frozen Baltic Sea could not be crossed. Thus, when there were bad harvests in Overkalix, the children starved, and when there were good harvests, they stuffed themselves.
More than a decade ago, three Swedish researchers dug up records from Overkalix going back to 1799 in order to correlate its children’s health data with records of regional harvests and other documents showing when food was and wasn’t available. What the researchers learned was extremely odd. They found that when boys ate badly during the years right before puberty, between the ages of 9 and 12, their sons, as adults, had lower than normal rates of heart disease. When boys ate all too well during that period, their grandsons had higher rates of diabetes.
When the study appeared in 2002, a British geneticist published an essay speculating that how much a boy ate in prepuberty could permanently reprogram the epigenetic switches that would govern the manufacture of sperm a few years later. And then, in a process so intricate that no one agrees yet how it happens but probably has something to do with the germline (the reproductive cells that are handed down to children, and to children’s children), those reprogrammed switches are transferred to his sons and his sons’ sons.
So parents, tell your sons to eat healthy, and stay away from drugs and excessive alcohol. The health of their children and grandchildren may depend on it. The article also has an interesting correlation between paternal age and autism and asks if the rise in autism cases is a direct result of the rise of older fathers.
But what is missing from the mainstream discussion of epigeneics is a closer look at IVF. Whether it is being conceived in a dish, or the egg and sperm used in the process, children conceived with IVF have been shown to have different patterns of gene expression that those conceived naturally. Some scientists speculate that these changes may put IVF children at greater risk of diabetes and obesity. And if epigenetic changes in sperm and egg can be passed on to future generations, then it is likely the epigenetic differences in IVF children are ones they will pass on to their children and grandchildren.
So IVF is not just about the child couples so desperately want to hold. In today's reproductive Brave New World, where natural biology is capriciously thrown overboard in favor of parental choice, the choices parents make in creating the next generation may be choices that extend to their grandchildren and great grandchildren.
Biological colonialism is on the rise. Rich couples from western nations hiring poor Indian women to be surrogates. It seems like a win-win. The infertile couple gets the child they so desperately want on the cheap and the surrogates make more money than they can hope to make in such a short time. But look closer and you find a disturbing western attitude that the poor, dark, and different women are not people, but vessels in which to grow the next generation; natural resources to be exploited to continue on the western blood line.
No where is this attitude more apparent that in this Daily Mail interview with a British woman Octavia who has hired a surrogate in India because commercial surrogacy is illegal in Britain.
It doesn't get more surreal than weighing the pros and cons of using fresh versus previously frozen IVF embryos as if they are chicken breasts headed for your favorite recipe. From Medical Xpress:
Doctor calls for debate on using frozen versus fresh embryos for IVF procedures
—New evidence from a study done by Aberdeen University showing that using frozen embryos implanted in the womb instead of those implanted fresh tends to reduce the risks for both mother and child, have led to calls for a debate on whether all embryos should be frozen before use in all IVF procedures. The study, conducted by examining the records of 13,000 pregnancies that came about as the result of IVF procedures, has been printed in the journal Fertility and Sterility, and is to be presented at an upcoming science festival by lead researcher Dr Abha Maheshwari. In examining the records, the team found that when frozen and thawed embryos were used in IVF procedures, the risk of bleeding over the course of the pregnancy was thirty percent lower than if fresh embryos were used; similarly, they found there was thirty to forty percent less chance of a low weight birth, twenty percent less likelihood of the baby being born early, and twenty percent less chance of the baby dying after birth. The research didn't turn up any definitive reasons for the differences in complication rates for frozen versus fresh implantation results but suggest that it might be either due to the fact that only stronger embryos survive the freezing process, or more likely the impact of the IVF process on the woman's body.
In this fresh vs. frozen debate, will some doctor suggest placing all embryos in anti-freeze and freezing them, making sure only the "stronger embryos survive"? I mean really people, when is the world going to wake up and see IVF for what it is: human manufacturing on a gigantic scale complete with quality control assessments?
