From this editorial in the latest edition of Contraception Journal comes frightening previews of how far our post-Christian culture is willing to travel from the sanctity of life ethic it one revered....As individuals and couples face decisions about whether to use genetic testing and ART [assisted reproductive technologies], practitioners will be ever more challenged to provide comprehensive and unbiased counseling for women who are pregnant or wishing to become pregnant. With the availability of prenatal, prepregnancy and preconception testing of fetuses, embryos and gametes for hundreds — and potentially thousands — of genetic conditions, prospective parents will have to make decisions about whether or not to use available genetic testing and what to do when they receive positive test results. While prenatal testing has been used for decades and providers have long counseled their patients in this area, they have not often had access to full information about raising a child with a disability...
[Note the unscientific use of the terms "prepregnancy" and "preconception" in the above paragraph. These terms defy the medical realities of when conception really occurs. And, of course, they are thus used to obscure what's really happening when women use "birth control" drugs and devices; namely, precious human beings conceived in the image of God are being destroyed.]
...Although platforms and positions will become more complex than in the past, advocacy for reproductive health rights and justice will be more important than ever during the next decade. The basic tenets of reproductive health and justice promote the rights of women, men, their families and communities to lead healthy reproductive lives and advance the conditions necessary to exercise them. Already the issues have become more complicated and dynamic than ever with the advent of new reproductive technologies.
How do we establish policies in the area of reproductive genetics while simultaneously assuring reproductive autonomy? For example, while we stand firm on the rights of all women to choose whether or not to have a child, to continue wanted pregnancies to term and to access legal and safe abortions, how do we answer questions such as, “Does the right to choose whether or not to have a child extend to the right to choose the characteristics of a child (e.g., choosing the child's sex or, in the future, possibly choosing eye color or other genetically determined traits)?”...
Yes, beyond the talk in this editorial about moving forward on "egg retrieval" for oneself or others, beyond its insistence on "unbiased" counseling (look out Christian physicians and CPCs), and beyond it's desire for yet more extensions of surgical and chemical abortion, the editors of Contraception Journal dare to suggest (as if it were a genuinely open moral question) that "leading healthy reproductive lives" just might include the aborting of babies because they have the wrong color of eyes!
When one considers this willingness of the modern scientific community to defy even heaven in its coercive push for abortion, embryonic stem cell experimentation, and genetic manipulation -- and when one remembers the enthusiasm of these things by the incoming Democrat administration (i.e., Ellen Moran, executive director of the abortion rights organization, EMILY’s List, was named White House communications director by President-elect Obama on Saturday) -- we see that the brave new world of bioethics is at our doorstep.
God save us.
