The USA has abdicated good ethics by allowing IVF to go virtually unregulated. The consequences are profound and growing. Rather than being a medical treatment for otherwise infertile married couples, IVF has become a lifestyle enhancer permitting parents to shop for the child they want like a breed of dog, rent wombs, eugenically select out unwanted children, expose young women to the pronounced, if rare, dangers to life, limb, and fertility by selling or donating their eggs, and is insinuating the crass values of naked consumerism into family life in which the unwanted are tossed away like so much medical waste.
And now we are developing a profoundly sexist market in gender selection IVF. From the story:
MEET the doctor who is making Scots’ dreams of designing the perfect baby come true. Dr Jeffrey Steinberg reveals five couples from Scotland have travelled to his US clinics in the past year to have a £13,000 procedure which allows them to choose the sex of their child. Sex selection in countries such as Scotland is banned unless there’s a medical reason, which provides Dr Steinberg’s clinics in New York and Los Angeles with brisk business from abroad. Now couples who suffer from gender disappointment are taking out loans and even remortgaging their homes to use in-vitro fertilisation to balance their families and get the girl or boy of their dreams.
Well, so much for unconditional love. And if the doctor makes a mistake, what’s next; “wrongful gender” lawsuits?
The doctor is “saddened” that Scotland believes in gender equality:
Despite this Dr Steinberg, who is a proud dad to two girls and a boy which, he explains, were conceived “the old fashioned way”, is baffled by the British ban on sex selection. He started training to become a doctor in Cambridge and feels saddened that Britain’s scientific trailblazers had to take a step back. He said: “They were at the forefront of in vitro technology. They’ve fallen so far behind but from the political end.” But he believes there’s no point in blocking change. What sparks fear today may seem normal tomorrow.
Those rationalizations–We’re falling behind! Don’t fear change, you’ll get used to it!–excuse anything. And once the remaining few vestiges of ethical control over IVF are swept away, the next step, I predict, will be to force IVF professionals to do whatever a customer (since a lot of this isn’t medical in the sense of treating illness or dysfunction) wants–as we have already begun to see imposed against doctors who wish to restrict their fertility treatments to the truly infertile who are married.
The answer isn’t opening more doors to preference sex selection, but closing the doors that are now wide open. Hmmmm. California could ban preference IVF sex selection by voter initiative. Now, there’s an idea!
August 7th, 2010 | 12:52 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Vince Humphreys, Stand In The Gap and Written in Stone, Wesley J. Smith. Wesley J. Smith said: USA Becoming Haven For Sex Selection IVF Tourism » Secondhand Smoke | A First Things Blog http://shar.es/0mn7b [...]
August 8th, 2010 | 12:26 am
Looks like the Republican Initiatives of 1970 finally are realized. Having congratulated themselves on divesting sex from procreation with the Pill, their next objective was to divest marriage from children by encouraging sex ONLY in marriage, children to be procured from fertility clinics to better ensure “genetic quality” and avoid “downbreeding”.
You can read more in detail thanks to the way George Bush (chairman of the GOP’s task force who published their “Earth Resources & Population” report in the 1970 Congressional Record) took pains to preserve the entirety of Dr. Handler’s views during an appearance in June of 1969, I believe.
Not only did Handler (sic), incoming chair of the American Academy of Sciences, share Bush’ concern that reproduction was the gravest crisis facing humanity, but he proposed that — “using the same techniques we now use for cattle” — fertility clinics could not only ensure “genetic quality” but turn out Einsteins and Mozarts on demand.
THE DAY the “right” finally realizes their leadership dictates the playbook of the “left” is the day we’ll finally get somewhere in fighting the good fight.
It’s all there for anyone who cares to read it. As a bonus, go check the name of Prescott Bush on Margaret Sanger’s “Birth Control League” letterhead or read Kissinger’s NSSM-100 to find out which party, exactly, found abortion to be the linchpin of our pop-control policies at home and abroad.
August 8th, 2010 | 12:29 am
Almost forgot … if you read the report as published in the Congressional Record, you find that the GOP discovered in 1970 a “right” to predetermine the sex of one’s children!
Fancy that!
August 9th, 2010 | 10:26 am
So Christina, what exactly, does politics have to do with this moral question? Obviously, you left [edited: thinkers] have no idea that it is primarily YOU, who have destroyed all morality in the U.S. After all, who nominated Ruth Bader Ginzberg, Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer, etc,. to the “court?” [Edited: Liberal thinking is] a curse on yourselves and the entire world!
August 9th, 2010 | 1:48 pm
The Rockefeller family, who gave Kissinger his start, is very much associated w/eungenics and population control. This includes Jay Rockefeller who is a Democrat. Unfortunately, Bill Gates, George Soros and Warren Buffet are also eugenicists (worried about over population, big abortion & contraception funders). When Bush Sr. ran against Reagan in 1980 for Republican nomination, he was pro-abortion — Reagan made Bush change his view (publicly) to be his VP.
August 12th, 2010 | 12:22 am
Frankly, given our experience with George W. Bush I find it hard to believe that his father was a proponent of eugenics.
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