Monday, July 28, 2008

MRI Reveals Misdiagnosis; Baby's Life Saved

Here's a story from Singapore that illustrates both the increasing impact of technology in treating preborn children (a MRI scan that saved a child's life by correcting a misdiagnosis) and yet the decreasing value of human life itself (the parents' desire to abort the baby when they believed him to be handicapped).

Sadly, the marvelous advances of medical technology and scientific knowledge we have seen in recent years cannot make up for the "devolution" in bioethics that has occurred.

Indeed, if society denies the inherent dignity and value of all human lives and instead begins to discriminate due to utilitarian concerns, costs, comfortability, degrees of "wantedness," and so on, even to the point of terminating kids whose problems we refuse to bother with, then those very advances in technology and knowledge that could save lives and dramatically improve our health, fitness and quality of life become used in the service of abortion, euthanasia, lethal embryonic experimentation, genetic manipulation, and other grossly unnatural and immoral activity.

Once the heart goes bad, the hands (and all the nifty tools they use) go bad too.