A Christian Worldview: Technology & Medicine (2)

Vallance, David (MD)

Part of the A Christian Worldview ~ A. J. Higgins series.

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Now that such impressive scienti c achievements are commonplace, people are growing restless for new categories of medical
treatment. No longer content with merely being well, the sel e culture wants to be better than well. In humbler times, providing
patients compassionate care was enough. But public expectation is shifting away from therapy toward enhancement, from restoring
health to pursuing perfection. New medical consumers, already sold on cosmetic surgery and at ease with performance-enhancing
drugs, are counting on a larger mall of products and services from which to choose. Genetic engineering promises to take their
personal enhancement to a whole new level. Some scientists are channeling resources away from the pursuit of legitimate gene
therapy to the search for genetic upgrades to sell to healthy people. They paint the picture of a biologically-augmented superhuman—a
healthy, pretty, and witty demigod engineered to live for centuries.

This fascination with human enhancements panders to pride. Behind the narcissism lurks the materialistic delusion that human life is a
merry-go-round that rotates once and then vanishes. Since a person goes around just once, he must quickly push and wheedle and sue
to acquire the things that make for a happy ride. If he could obtain a premium mind and a perfect body, his ride would be all the
merrier. What fun to be superior to the little people who can’t a ord the technology! Amos rebuked the wealthy, self-indulgent people
of Samaria, calling the leisure-class women “cows of Bashan” who graze in luxury, demand that their husbands satisfy their cravings,
and despise the needy around them (Amos 4:1). Similarly, modern rst-world egoists will consume more and more medical resources
for personal enhancements not central to medicine, while millions will go without even basic care.

Point-and-Click Babies
If a designer body is appealing, many future parents are even more excited about the prospect of designer babies. Gender selection is
already straightforward with current arti cial insemination and in vitro fertilization techniques. We might justify choosing the sex of a
child if parents want to avoid passing a sex-linked genetic disorder to their children, such as the hemophilia B that Queen Victoria
spread through her o spring to many royal houses in Europe. Such illnesses are unusual; most parents have no medical justi cation
for choosing their baby’s gender. Some want a boy or a girl to “balance” their families, while others want to choose the gender favored
in their culture—usually male. China’s one-child policy shows where sex selection leads: because of their preference for male children,
Chinese couples created a gender imbalance by selectively aborting girls. By 2008, China had 22% more boys than girls, and this
surplus of young men is now fomenting social unrest.

Genetic engineering promises choices far beyond a child’s gender. Technicians can now use CRISPR-Cas9 molecular scissors to edit the
DNA of egg and sperm cells. If we use this powerful technology to cut out and replace faulty genes, we will promote wellness. However,
as genomic research identi es gene clusters associated with desirable traits such as increased intelligence, athleticism, and musicality,
engineers will start to edit genes for non-medical purposes. Parents will soon be able to point and click their way down a menu of
options to upgrade their baby’s personality, abilities, and appearance.

The designer-baby movement a ronts God’s sovereign will. God makes each child male or female and chooses his or her
characteristics in the womb as He pleases (Gen 1:27; Psa 139:13-17). Children are His gifts, and parents are to accept and love them
unconditionally as whole persons, and not merely as commodities with pre-selected traits (Psa 127:3-5). Further, if parents control their
child’s genetic endowments, they will corrupt normal bonding. Genetically engineered children will quickly realize that their parents,
looking for a return on investment, love them not for who they are, but for how they perform. Children with genetic upgrades will bear
the burden of living up to the standards their parents designed them to meet: they must excel. The oppressive weight of these
expectations will smother their freedom to make their own way in the world.

Fetal Harvesting
Like current in vitro fertility techniques, the process of gene editing requires technicians to generate many embryos. From these, they
will select one or two expressing the desired traits and destroy the rest—or sell them. They will implant the chosen one or two in a
mother’s womb either to go to term as designer babies, or to die by abortion to harvest their designer tissue. As recent exposés have
shown, the current abortion industry has grown rich from the sale of fetal organs; the designer-baby and designer-abortion industries
will greatly expand this tra cking in baby parts. We would rightly denounce surgeons and scientists who took advantage of an
organized homicidal machine that provided them with a limitless supply of cadavers for transplantation and research. The horri ed
world condemned the Nazi death system for doing just that. Two generations later, it is happening again. The only di erence? We have
substituted human embryos as the group of violated, commodi ed human beings priced at market value (Rev 18:13).

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At Nuremberg, the world rightly rejected the Nazi doctors’ argument that since these inmates were going to be killed anyway, they
should be put to good use. Yet proponents of gene editing have joined with abortion propagandists to advance the same rationale.
They assuage the guilt of parents who are choosing death for their unborn children, arguing that the mother can redeem her abortion
by donating the baby parts to provide tissue for research and therapy. Further, when patients need fetal tissue with precise genetic
pro les to correct their medical problems, the system will recruit women to conceive life solely to terminate it. Who can possibly give
consent for this? The mother who has chosen to have her unborn child killed, and who pro ts from the death, plainly has no moral
status to speak on her baby’s behalf.

The Bible teaches that the “let us do evil that good may come” argument is wicked, and that utilitarian end-justi es-the-means
reasoning is unconscionable for believers (Rom 3:8). Killing an innocent human being to alleviate the su ering of another is an immoral
way of achieving that end. God never justi es evil means to produce good ends, even when those ends are highly desired. Since all
human beings bear God’s image, we must honor each person as a noble end, and never demean him or her as a mere means for
another’s gain. Adding a wrong to a wrong does not subtract the rst wrong; it simply adds another wrong, compounding evil.

– To be continued

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