Question:
Father: Is it permissible to resort to technical advances to avoid having children with diseases, for them to be healthy and perfect children? What can you tell us about the attempts of modern medicine to avoid serious diseases in children, such as cancer and some similar problems? We are interested in your answer because in our marriage we have already had a child with a genetic problem. Thank you.
Answer:
Dear friend:
It is certainly not immoral to resort to medical advances to prevent, as far as possible, some hereditary diseases in children. In any case, we should not be fooled by euphemisms, that is to say, by those fabricated phrases that sound good but hide a big lie. It is precisely in this field of medical advances that we walk over euphemisms like a minefield.
Most of the techniques that call themselves ‘tests to prevent hereditary diseases’ are not techniques to prevent diseases (at least not at the moment) but to prevent ‘sick people’. A doctor cannot, in the current state of medical science, prevent babies from being born with diseases such as cancer, deafness, Alzheimer’s or trisomy 21 (mongolism); what he can prevent is the birth of babies who are affected by these diseases; that is, he can kill them by allowing only those who are catalogued by the doctors as ‘perfect’ to be born.
Let us not be deceived, the ‘search for perfect children’ that is being debated today is nothing more than a self-righteous disguise to hide the slaughter of those human beings who come into this world with physical defects. The ‘son à la carte’, ordered as one orders a plate of fish in a refined restaurant, is the modern face of an aberrant practice put into practice by the Spartans and renewed in the first half of the 20th century by the Nazi ideology, and again resurrected by a broad sector of medicine at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century.
The United States, whose government wants to present itself to the world as the defender of modern freedom, is at the forefront of this anti-human practice. Modern concentration camps have more sonorous names, such as St. Barnabas Medical Center (in West Orange, New Jersey) or the Chicago Reproductive Genetics Institute in the city of Chicago (cf. Zenit, October 26, 2002); but what they do is the same as what was done at Auschwitz and Turkheim: arbitrarily decide who is to live and who is to die.
The same is being done elsewhere in the world, as an article in the Herald Sun newspaper in Australia (September 27, 2002) has shown: a new program in the state of Victoria has led to the birth of ‘eight perfect babies last year’. This means that some couples were given the possibility to select their embryos, eliminating those with certain defects (e.g. deafness, spina bifida, Alzheimer’s and various cancers of the ovaries, stomach, brain, bones and tissues).
Something similar happens with sex selection. When parents are offered the possibility of deciding the sex of their children, in reality they are offering the possibility of leaving alive the children who have the sex desired by the parents and eliminating (killing, murdering, destroying) those who do not have that sex. The Los Angeles Times (July 23, 2002) reported on the case of a woman who, after having three boys, went to a clinic. The center produced five embryos: three male embryos, which were frozen, and two female embryos, which were implanted. The Tyler medical clinic to which the woman turned is run by Dr. Jaroslav Marik, who believes that embryo selection can be used to almost eliminate diseases such as cystic fibrosis. We come back to the same thing: it is not the disease that is eliminated, but the patient. This is not a medical clinic, it is simply a butcher’s shop.
Let us not deceive ourselves; Pope John Paul II has already said in his encyclical ‘Evangelium Vitae’ (n. 14) that the techniques of artificial reproduction ‘which would seem to be placed at the service of life and which are often practiced with this intention, in reality give rise to new attacks on life’.
Let us not lie to ourselves. Let us call bread bread and wine wine. Let us also call medicine only medicine, and life only life; but let us be able to call the murderer in a white coat a murderer, even if he has graduated from the best medical university in the world.
Fr. Miguel A. Fuentes, IVE
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