Eugenics

This week atheist writer, Richard Dawkins, tweeted that parents should abort their babies with Downs and "try again." He said it was "immoral" for parents not to kill their baby if he or she had an extra 21st chromosome. (Notice how quickly a "choice" becomes an "obligation" in the Culture of Death.)

After reading his comments, I wanted to write a post that was composed of just one sentence:

Richard Dawkins is an ignorant bigot.

The Reillys represent some of the experiences reported in three surveys conducted by doctors at Children’s Hospital in Boston that suggest the reality of Down syndrome is positive for a vast majority of parents, siblings and people with Down syndrome themselves.

Among 2,044 parents or guardians surveyed, 79 percent reported their outlook on life was more positive because of their child with Down syndrome....

Skotko also found that among siblings ages 12 and older, 97 percent expressed feelings of pride about their brother or sister with Down syndrome and 88 percent were convinced they were better people because of their sibling with Down syndrome. A third study evaluating how adults with Down syndrome felt about themselves reports 99 percent responded they were happy with their lives, 97 percent liked who they are, and 96 percent liked how they looked.

But even where selective reproduction is eugenic (which it sometimes is) it does not follow automatically from this that it’s wrong (despite the fact that many instances of eugenics historically have been morally abhorrent). For provided that the means used are ethically acceptable, and that people freely consent, it’s not clear that attempting to improve population health (‘the gene pool’) is a bad thing for us to be doing. On the contrary, it seems on the face of it to be a good thing – given the high value that most of us place on good health, and on preventing ourselves and our loved ones from acquiring diseases or impairments.

"You will be interested to know, that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought.…I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people."

Eugenics is back, but now instead of taking place in concentration camps, it is taking place in IVF clinics and abortion clinics all across the globe.  PGD and eugenic abortion are systematically ending the lives of millions who are view by their parents as "genetically unfit."  Whether it is because they have an extra chromosome or they are the wrong sex, embryos and fetuses everywhere are being destroyed because their genetic make up is not what is desired.  In many countries the rate of abortion for fetuses with Down Syndrome is over 90%.  This is clear indication that eugenics is back in full force but this time it is the youngest members of our species that are the victims.

Our society has somehow rationalized our eugenics as something other than it is.  Often PGD and eugenics abortion are presented as the compassionate alternative to bringing a genetically defective child into the world.  Parents are told that it would be cruel to continue their child's life because the child will undoubtedly suffer.  What well-meaning parents do not realize is that Hitler used the same argument for his extermination of genetically defective children.  Hitler praised the ancient Spartan practice of disposing of any weak or deformed babies as the compassionate way to deal with them:

The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short, their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject, and indeed at any price, and yet takes the life of a hundred thousand healthy children in consequence of birth control or through abortions, in order subsequently to breed a race of degenerates burdened with illnesses.

Killing embryos and fetuses with disease does not elevate their status or prove how compassionate we are.  It instead screams that these lives were better off dead than diseased.  As uncomfortable as it is to hear, that was also Hitler's approach and we all know how that ended.  The proper way to treat disease is to treat the disease, not to get rid of the patient.  But we have somehow fallen into the same eugenics trap of last century.  Of this I am certain.  It only takes a look at eugenics past and present.

Eugenics Then:

"The feeble-minded person is not desirable, he is a social encumbrance, often a burden to himself.  In short it were better for him and for society had he never been born.  Should we not then, in our attempt to improve the race, begin by preventing the birth of more feeble-minded?" 
--H.H. Goddard, early 20th Century eugenics activist

"Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind…. Any group of farmers who permitted their best stock not to breed, and let all the increase come from the worst stock, would be treated as fit inmates for an asylum…. Some day we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty of the good citizens of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type."
--Theodore Roosevelt

Eugenics Now:

"Soon it will be a sin for parents to have a child that carries the heavy burden of genetic disease. We are entering a world where we have to consider the quality of our children."
-- Robert Edwards, Nobel Prize in Medicine winner for pioneering in vitro fertilization (IVF)

"Margery Shaw, a doctor and lawyer, wrote in the Journal of Legal Medicine that women who carry a genetic defect such as Tay-Sachs and who go forward with a pregnancy of an affected fetus should be prosecuted as criminals....  When I gave a speech at Emory Law School in Atlanta, students came up to me afterward and said that, with genetic testing readily available, women shouldn't be allowed to have children with disabilities, since it raises people's insurance rates." 
--Lori B. Andrews, reproductive rights lawyer from her book The Clone Age (p. 161)

"I have suggested that there should be tattooed on the forehead of every young person a symbol showing possession of the sickle-cell gene or whatever other similar gene, such as the gene for phenylketonuria, that he has been found to possess in a single dose.... It is my opinion that legislation along this line, compulsory testing for defective genes before marriage, and some form of public or semi-public display of this possession, should be adopted."
-- Linus Pauling, Nobel Prize winning chemist

"She was a fresh-faced young woman with a couple of adorable kids, whiling away an hour in the sandbox at the park near my home....  Her eyes flicked over to where my daughter sat, shovel gripped in a tiny fist, and then traveled quickly away. The remark that followed was directed to the woman next to her, but her voice carried clearly across the playground. "Isn't it a shame," she said, an eyebrow cocked in Margaret's direction, "that everyone doesn't get amnio?"
--Patricia Bauer, mother of Margaret who has Down syndrome

This story breaks my heart.  I spent many years sequencing the DNA of little girls looking for the mutations that cause Rett Syndrome.  A toddler with Rett Syndrome has drowned under suspicious circumstances after her parents asked if she could be euthanized.  From Australia's Herald Sun:

A COUPLE was worried their disabled toddler was interfering with their "idyllic" lifestyle and investigated the possibility of euthanasing her shortly before the girl drowned in a backyard pool, a court was told yesterday.

An inquest at Glebe Coroner's Court is investigating whether the two-year-old's drowning in a pool at her Northern Beaches home was the result of a "deliberate act" or a tragic accident.

The inquest heard the girl's parents, who cannot be named, described themselves to social workers as "happy and beautiful people" living an "idyllic" lifestyle. But they were also so distressed by their daughter's disability - a neuro-developmental condition called Rett syndrome - they asked health specialists whether euthanasia was "legally possible".

As they explored the possibility of foster care arrangements, admitting the girl's condition was "dragging us down", the toddler drowned.

The girl was discovered face down in the inflatable pool on December 3, 2007 - just months after doctors diagnosed her with the incurable condition.

Rett syndrome is suffered almost exclusively by girls and its early symptoms include a regression in speech skills and repetitive hand movements.

Ultimately the girl would have been severely disabled and the inquest heard her parents pleaded with DOCS and health clinics to place her in foster care. The court heard her father asked, "Why do they keep children with these disabilities alive?"

Counsel assisting the coroner, Sergeant Stephen Kelly, said it was possible the little girl had been "immersed in water" for up to 20 minutes.The inquest heard that although the mother was a swimming instructor, she did not perform CPR.

Sgt Kelly said the coroner would have to decide if the girl's death was "by accidental drowning or deliberate act".
 
"And if it was a deliberate act, did that arise because of the threats that had been made by the parents leading up to the death that [she] would be better off dead than alive with Rett syndrome?" he asked.

Maybe this was an accident; maybe it wasn't.  What is clear is if a disabled child was left unattended in a backyard pool for anywhere near 20 minutes, she was not being cared for properly.

It is not surprising that this couple asked for their daughter to be euthanized.  In a society that believes death is a legitimate medical treatment, their request is reasonable.  If this couple had known she had Retts in utero they would have no doubt aborted her.  But Retts doesn't show itself until a girl is 12 to 18 months old when a seemingly normal toddler suddenly begins to lose her ability to speak and becomes developmentally delayed.   That is likely this couple's rational: "If only we had known, we never would have let the pregnancy go to term!  We would have saved her (and us) all that suffering!"

What is tragic is that in recent years there has been some promising treatments for Rett Syndrome tested in mice and now researchers have used induced pluripotent stem cells to create Rett Syndrome neurons as a testing model.  It is very possible that had she lived, this little girl could have seen a treatment for Retts in her lifetime.

This is the fruit of embracing abortion as the "treatment" for genetic defects in fetuses.  Using death as a solution to genetic disorders disregards the possibility that ten, fifteen or twenty years in the future a treatment may be available. 

Contrary to popular belief, aborting genetically diseased children does not cure genetic disease.  It only gets rid of the people with the genetic disease.  And it marginalizes those children that do make it out of the womb.  Like this couple, I am sure there are many other people who also think that if you can abort "defective children" before they are born, then you should be able to kill them after they are born as well.

I know a lot about the genetics of cystic fibrosis also known as CF.  I have tested thousands of people for mutations in the CFTR gene that cause this debilitating lung disease.  The majority of people that I have tested were pregnant women.   I know some of those babies that were found to have CF (upon further testing) probably did not make it out of the womb.  Like with Down Syndrome, there is a systematic assault on fetuses with CF.  I have heard first hand accounts of women who were pressured to abort their CF baby and made to feel like they were terrible mothers if they didn't.  This is truly a shame because, as I also know first hand, there are people walking around who genetically have CF, but are healthy.  Some have CF and do not even know it.  Even if they are not healthy, CF children are still wonderful human beings that should be celebrated.

I saw two such people on America's Got Talent.  Christina and Ali were told they would not be able to sing.  I am so glad they proved the doctors wrong:

For example, [Republican] South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer thinks that giving poor people food will cause them to breed like rabbits:

My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals,” Bauer told a Greenville-area crowd. “You know why? Because they breed. “You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.

Although he says he could have chosen his words more carefully when he compared people who take public assistance to stray animals, Bauer refused to apologize for the remark.

Contrary to what Limbaugh and other Holocaust deniers would have you believe, German medicine and science were not brought into the Nazi party once Hitler took power. They fueled the fire for what became Nazism with bigotry proffered as science.

What distinguished the doctors and scientists of Germany pre-Hitler was that so many of them were firm believers in racial hygiene — the view that the Aryan race’s very existence was threatened by inferior peoples such as Jews, blacks and Slavs. They felt the only way to protect their "race," a concept that itself made little biological sense, was to prohibit reproduction with inferior people and, ultimately, to destroy them. It was racism masquerading as science that formed the basis for Nazi science and medicine right down to the gas chambers and ovens that my dad found himself staring at in 1945.

Caplan is right here.  No doubt.  I agree we have to be careful when we make analogies to Nazi Germany so as not marginalize what happened there.  But it is this next part that has me scratching my head:

Racism was at the core of Nazi medicine. Racism and a bizarre form of genetics that saw all manner of human frailty and weakness from prostitution to alcohol abuse to petty theft as highly heritable. When Hitler set out to kill the handicapped and the mentally ill he did it to protect the genetic future of Germany. When the "useless eaters" were targeted for euthanasia it was because of the threat they posed to the genetic health of future generations. When Nazi doctors mandated abortion it was to eliminate "mongrel" babies. When Nazi doctors analyzed how many of your ancestors had to be Jewish for you to be a Jew or when they killed all manner of Slavs, it was to remove these dangers from undermining the public health of the Reich.

Caplan seems to be saying that none of these abuses go on in this country.  But take a closer look and you will see that maybe we are not as far from these abuses as you might think.  Many women have recounted their experience with doctors bullying them into aborting their "genetically defective" babies. The Oregon Health plan (state run health care) has told terminally ill Oregon residents that they will pay for drugs to kill them but not drugs to extend their lives.  And ethicists have contended that it is criminal for parents with known geneticist defects to pass them on to their children.  In addition, there is some public sentiment that the "defective" are a drain on the rest of the nation.  Consider the following quotes from Lori B. Andrews, a reproductive rights lawyer:

"A woman I know was told by her obstetrician that her fetus had Down syndrome.  The doctor ordered her to abort, she refused....  Another woman was similarly coerced.  Her doctor told her that her baby would be more like a fish than a human and would only be as smart as a baboon."

"When I gave a speech at Emory Law School in Atlanta, students came up to me afterward and said that, with genetic testing readily available, women shouldn't be allowed to have children with disabilities, since it raises people's insurance rates." 

"Margery Shaw, a doctor and lawyer, wrote in the Journal of Legal Medicine that women who carry a genetic defect such as Tay-Sachs and who go forward with a pregnancy of an affected fetus should be prosecuted as criminals."

I contend we have a racism alive and well in this country.  Now, it is against those who are "genetically defective".

While Caplan rightly identifies racism as a driving force in Nazi medicine, I have to wonder of this racism have gone so far without a socialized system of medicine?  The Nazi's were socialists are all.  Would this prejudice have gone so far without the Nazi government running health care?  The Nazi's, as Caplan points out, took existing prejudice and took it to a another level. 

I am not eager to repeat the experiment to see if it would happen here. The British health system has already been accused of appalling treatment of the mentally disabled, including the starvation death of a man with Down syndrome in a hospital.

Unless the government is willing to uphold the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death, I do not trust it to NOT put the current prejudices of the day into public policy.  Especially, with presidential appointees who idolize known eugenicists.

This expose, brought to my attention by Michelle Malkin, goes in depth into Holdren's infatuation with the known eugenicist Harrison Brown.  In a speech as recent as 2007, Holdren has held up Harrison Brown as his mentor and a source of inspiration.  In 1986, Holdren edited and co-wrote a book honoring Harrison Brown titled Earth and the Human Future: Essays in Honor of Harrison Brown in which Holdren writes:

"Harrison Brown's most remarkable book, The Challenge of Man's Future, was published more than three decades ago. By the time I read it as a high school student a few years later, the book had been widely acclaimed.... The Challenge of Man's Future pulled these interests together for me in a way that transformed my thinking about the world and about the sort of career I wanted to pursue. I have always suspected that I am not the only member of my generation whose aspirations and subsequent career were changed by this book of Harrison Brown's."

So what does Harrison Brown's book The Challenge of Man's Future that so greatly inspired John Holdren actually say.  Here are a few gems.  From page 104:

Is there anything that can be done to prevent the long-range degeneration of human stock? Unfortunately, at the present time there is little, other than to prevent breeding in persons who present glaring deficiencies clearly dangerous to society and which are known to be of a hereditary nature. Thus we could sterilize or in other ways discourage the mating of the feeble-minded. We could go further and systematically attempt to prune from society, by prohibiting them from breeding, persons suffering from serious inheritable forms of physical defects, such as congenital deafness, dumbness, blindness, or absence of limbs.

This is the same garbage espoused by the eugenicists of decades earlier.  This thinking was rejected by 1954, especially after Americans saw where it ended up: namely Nazi Germany.  But here is Brown rehashing the same social engineering masquerading as science.  And again from page 263:

Priorities for artificial insemination could be given to healthy women of high intelligence whose ancestors possessed no dangerous genetic defects. Conversely, priorities for abortions could be given to less intelligent persons of biologically unsound stock.

Such steps would undoubtedly contribute substantially to a slowing down of species deterioration. But it is clear that they would by no means be sufficient. A broad eugenics program would have to be formulated which would aid in the establishment of policies that would encourage able and healthy persons to have several offspring and discourage the unfit from breeding at excessive rates.

Ironically, these words were written a scant 12 years before President Obama was born.  And Holdren praised this work in his own book when Obama was 22.  I have to wonder, since this was written before the civil rights movement, if the Obamas would have fit into Brown's idea of "biologically unsound stock." 

Please read the entire piece on John Holdren and Harrison Brown.  It is critical that we know and understand who is advising our President on science and technology and what ideas have shaped them.

In November 2005 he suffered a stroke at a residential home where he had been living happily with carers in Richmond, south-west London. He was transferred to a general ward at Kingston hospital.

Doctors and nurses should have been immediately concerned about nutrition for a patient who could not swallow as a result of the stroke. He could not talk, but speech therapists and community nurses tried to intervene on his behalf.

The ombudsmen said: "They could not make themselves heard and nothing happened to help Mr Ryan. Nobody took any action to feed him."

After he had lain starving in a hospital bed for 18 days, the medical team realised that he needed to have a feeding tube fitted. But by then he was too ill to undergo the procedure. He died eight days later.

Outrageous.  This is not just a single incident either.  An investigation into Britain's National Health Service (NHS), the government run health care system, revealed an "appalling" neglect of people with learning disabilities by the NHS.  From The Guardian:

NHS and social care staff have been responsible for an appalling catalogue of neglect of people with learning disabilities, the health and local government ombudsmen say today after an investigation into six "distressing" deaths....

Ann Abraham, the health service ombudsman for England, said: "The recurrence of complaints across different agencies leads us to believe the quality of care in the NHS and social services for people with learning disabilities is at best patchy, and at worst an indictment of our society."

healthofchildren.com

Impossible you say? You know that heel stick that your child got in the hospital right after birth?  Some states keep and catalog that blood for use in further research and some envision a time when a whole genome scan is performed on that sample.  There are real concerns that the information provided by that seemingly innocuous heel stick could be used to usher in a new era of eugenics.

Now I am NOT saying that the newborn testing programs that screen newborns for as many as 76 genetic conditions is evil.  I think these newborn screening programs are important to the health of American children.  But I am very concerned that parents are not informed about what happens to their children's blood after it leaves their precious little feet.  I am sure that parents do not know that once the blood leaves their child, it is often the property of the State.

The Citizens' Council on Health Care has released a new report that raises concerns about the extension of eugenics into State newborn screening programs. The report states:

Newborn genetic screening is done at State health department laboratories. Hospitals send newborn blood on a special card to the health department. The test results are then sent to the infant’s physician. Some States—perhaps all States—register newborn test results in a state database....

Public health agencies not only collect genetic testing data, they collect DNA—the baby’s blood. Hospitals are required to send more blood to the agency than is needed for the testing. This over-collection provides health officials with a rich supply of citizen DNA that some states are already using for research without consent....

Twenty states store newborn blood samples from one to 23 years.  With 4 million babies born each year and at least ten states retaining newborn blood indefinitely, the repository of infant DNA is large and growing. The baby’s DNA is considered state government property. According to the book, The Stored Tissue Issue, there are currently “more than 13.5 million newborn screening cards in storage and new cards being stored at a rate of 10,000 - 500,000 cards a year, depending on state populations.”  Most parents have no idea this is happening.

I believe the issue here is not the newborn screening.  It is the fact that parents are not being properly informed about what is being done with their child's DNA.  States do allow parents to "opt out", but that means that their child does not get the benefit of testing.

Parents need to be given the option of having their child's sample be destroyed after the testing is done.  Any storage or use of their child's DNA for research should be an "opt in" situation where informed consent is given by the parents for any use outside the scope of the initial genetic testing.

Beyond the parental consent issue, the Citizens' Council on Health Care is concerned that these databases will be used to bring back state-sponsored eugenics:

Today’s newborn genetic screening advocates envision a much more comprehensive program in the future. The Heartland Regional Genetics and Newborn Screening Collaborative looks forward to every infant being screened for at least 200 different conditions. Others predict the full genomic sequencing of each child at birth. Søren Holm writes in the book, A Companion to Genethics:

Newborn screening, which is usually mandated by governments to identify and treat diseases of infancy, has been limited, for ethical reasons, to disorders where early diagnosis and treatment would benefit the newborn, but with multiplex tests the focus of testing may be expanding to include some nontreatable disorders. Kitcher (1996) foresees the day when parents will receive an entire ‘genetic report card” at the child’s birth predicting lifetime health.”

Such predictive capability in the hands of government officials and others is not without significant eugenic risk.

Unfortunately, the Citizens' Council on Health Care is correct.  Especially in a possible future state sponsored health-care system where rationing health care resources is a necessity, your child's genetic profile maybe used against them.

The Citizens' Council on Health Care concludes that parents need to be given choices on what conditions their children are tested for.  They call for the destruction of any existing State newborn DNA repositories and call for informed consent from parents for further storage and testing of newborn DNA.

Hat Tip: BioPolitical Times

How American corporate philanthropies launched a national campaign of ethnic cleansing in the United States, helped found and fund the Nazi eugenics of Hitler and Mengele — and then created the modern movement of "human genetics."

In the first three decades of the 20th Century, American corporate philanthropy combined with prestigious academic fraud to create the pseudoscience eugenics that institutionalized race politics as national policy. The goal: create a superior, white, Nordic race and obliterate the viability of everyone else.

How? By identifying so-called "defective" family trees and subjecting them to legislated segregation and sterilization programs. The victims: poor people, brown-haired white people, African Americans, immigrants, Indians, Eastern European Jews, the infirm and really anyone classified outside the superior genetic lines drawn up by American raceologists. The main culprits were the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune, in league with America's most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Harvard, Yale and Princeton, operating out of a complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. The eugenic network worked in tandem with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the State Department and numerous state governmental bodies and legislatures throughout the country, and even the U.S. Supreme Court. They were all bent on breeding a eugenically superior race, just as agronomists would breed better strains of corn. The plan was to wipe away the reproductive capability of the weak and inferior.

Ultimately, 60,000 Americans were coercively sterilized — legally and extra-legally. Many never discovered the truth until decades later. Those who actively supported eugenics include America's most progressive figures: Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Sanger and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

American eugenic crusades proliferated into a worldwide campaign, and in the 1920s came to the attention of Adolf Hitler. Under the Nazis, American eugenic principles were applied without restraint, careening out of control into the Reich's infamous genocide. During the pre-War years, American eugenicists openly supported Germany's program. The Rockefeller Foundation financed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and the work of its central racial scientists. Once WWII began, Nazi eugenics turned from mass sterilization and euthanasia to genocidal murder. One of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute doctors in the program financed by the Rockefeller Foundation was Josef Mengele who continued his research in Auschwitz, making daily eugenic reports on twins. After the world recoiled from Nazi atrocities, the American eugenics movement — its institutions and leading scientists — renamed and regrouped under the banner of an enlightened science called human genetics.

If you live in the Santa Barbara area please go see this film.  We are falling in love with eugenics again.  I pray we wake up to its fallacies before it is too late.

"First baby tested for breast cancer form BRCA1 before conception born in UK," says the press release from University College London. "The first baby tested preconceptionally for a genetic form of breast cancer (BRCA1)

"preconceptions"

has been born." The release quotes Paul Serhal, medical director of the hospital's Assisted Conception Unit...

It's happy news. But let's take a closer look at the announcement, starting with the test "before conception." This baby was tested as an embryo in a dish. She was one of 11 such embryos made by injecting drugs in the mother to stimulate production of excess eggs, which were then fertilized with the father's sperm. Six of the embryos had the gene for breast cancer. Three more had "other abnormalities." All nine were "discarded." The other two were implanted, and one became this baby.

In sum, at least six human embryos were made and then thrown away because they failed a test. We now call such tests "preconception." This is the next step in our gradual devaluation of embryos. First, we said IVF embryos weren't pregnancies. That's technically correct: Pregnancy begins when the embryo implants in the womb. Then we called early embryos "pre-embryos" so we could dismantle them to get stem cells. That was technically incorrect, but we did it because it made us feel better. Now we're adjusting the word conception. Henceforth, testing of IVF embryos to decide which will live or die is preconception. Don't fret about the six eggs we fertilized, rejected, and flushed in selecting this baby. They were never really conceived. In fact, they weren't embryos. According to Serhal, each was just "an affected cluster of cells."

A director of a medical facility is calling a human embryo "an affected cluster of cells."  This is outrageous! 

Just as I suspected, it was the doctor that stated that PGD was done "preconception."  No matter that "preconception" testing technically would be on the parents' egg and sperm.  Serhal makes his own definition of conception so desperate English couples can solicit his services guilt-free.

Doctors and scientists are people too.  Some will pull the wool over your eyes to enhance their bottom line.

Eugenic selection of embryos is now possible by employing in vitro fertilization (IVF) and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). While PGD is currently being employed for the purposes of detecting chromosomal abnormalities or inherited genetic abnormalities, it could in principle be used to test any genetic trait such as hair colour or eye colour.

Genetic research is rapidly progressing into the genetic basis of complex traits like intelligence and a gene has been identified for criminal behaviour in one family. Once the decision to have IVF is made, PGD has few 'costs' to couples, and people would be more inclined to use it to select less serious medical traits, such as a lower risk of developing Alzheimer Disease, or even for non-medical traits. PGD has already been used to select embryos of a desired gender in the absence of any history of sex-linked genetic disease.

I will argue that: (1) some non-disease genes affect the likelihood of us leading the best life; (2) we have a reason to use information which is available about such genes in our reproductive decision-making; (3) couples should select embryos or fetuses which are most likely to have the best life, based on available genetic information, including information about non-disease genes. I will also argue that we should allow selection for non-disease genes even if this maintains or increases social inequality. I will focus on genes for intelligence and sex selection.

I will defend a principle which I call Procreative Beneficence: couples (or single reproducers) should select the child, of the possible children they could have, who is expected to have the best life, or at least as good a life as the others, based on the relevant, available information.

Imagine a couple has two embryos that are free of major genetic disorders. 'A' has a 10% chance of Alzheimer Disease while 'B 'does not. What possible reason could there be NOT to select 'B'?

I have a litmus test that I want to try out here.  If I can interchange a human being for an object like a car or home in a statement and it still makes sense then there is something seriously wrong with the statement.  Let us change the word "embryo" for the word "car" And "Alzheimer Disease" with "transmission trouble" and see what we get:

Imagine a couple has two cars that are free of major mechanical problems. 'A' has a 10% chance of transmission trouble while 'B 'does not. What possible reason could there be NOT to select 'B'?

Children are not cars or homes.  When we begin to see them as major investments that we research in Consumer Reports and then make the best choice, we have a real problem.  Why?  Well, what happens when we do not get what we paid for?  Do we get to take them back?  Do we sue the 'manufacturer' and call them a 'mistake?'  What happens if we decide we should have waited for a better model?  Do we get to trade-up?  And what happens to the 'outdated unit?'  All of a sudden Procreative Beneficence turns children into nothing more than a major life purchase.  Is that really giving children the "best life?"

And what if the criteria we used to make our choice was seriously flawed?  Which brings me to my second point, which is purely for the secularist.  What ever happened to Darwin?  The whole idea of evolution is that individuals have small genetic differences and NATURE decides who has the genetic advantage.  Nature being a million different influences in an entire ecosystem, most of which our tiny humans brains could not possibly comprehend.

If we could screw up the planet so bad with our choices for a "best life", then who could possibly think we could do better with our own species?  Genetics is a truly complex area and it is pure arrogance to think we could ever have all the information to decide which children will have the "best life" based solely on genetic information.  By choosing one trait, we may just be choosing against another that would make those who have it better adapted to future environmental constraints.  Nature is vastly more qualified than we are to make such decisions.  It would be folly to believe otherwise.

It seems to me that to have true Procreative Beneficence we should NOT select the "best" children.  Children will have the 'best life" if we embrace the genetic diversity that results from old fashioned reproduction and love our children unconditionally.  As for genetic disease, I say we should treat the disease, not get rid of the people who have it.  Who knows, that "genetic defect" maybe a "genetic advantage" for a better life in the future.

The AU$3,440 test, called karyomapping, which should be available as early as next year, will allow couples at risk of passing on gene defects to conceive healthy children using IVF treatment. [My emphasis]

This statement is such a subtle slight of hand, that even I almost missed it.  The karomapping that Savulescu discusses would test embryos created with IVF for genetic disorders, among other things, and then the couple can chose which embryos to implant.  The embryos that do not make the cut are discarded, donated to research or kept in the deep freeze indefinitely.  So Savulescu is very wrong.  Couples will conceive both "healthy" and "defective" embryos.  The defective ones just don't get a chance to finish their lives because they are deemed inferior to their siblings. 

This procedure, a more sophisticated version of preimplantation genetic diagnosis or PGD, does not cure disease.  It just gets rid of those humans that have the disease.  Muehlenberg writes:

But as Australian ethicist Anthony Fisher reminds us, scientists should
focus on curing such diseases rather than eliminating people with the
condition. Genetic screening can easily lead to selective breeding and
selective abortion. It can easily lead us to a return to eugenics

Which brings me to a quote from Leon Kass that Muehlenberg rightly highlights:

One of the most worrisome but least appreciated aspects of the godlike power of the new genetics is its tendency to ‘redefine’ a human being in terms of his genes. Once a person is decisively characterized by his genotype, it is but a short step to justifying death solely for genetic sins.

Anyone who was awake during this election cycle could not escape the vitriol spewed at Sarah Palin.  The irrationality of it made me conclude that her transgression was not just being a conservative.  Her real sin was to give birth to Trig, her Down syndrome son. Open your eyes and you will see that in the eyes of many, including some of the most influential bioethicists in the world, "genetic sins" are already walking among us.