One Child, Three Parents: What is Wrong with this Picture?

Scientists in the UK have found a way to make a child with three parents.

Yes, you read that correctly.

I wonder if this calls under Pope Paul VI's prophecies somewhere.

In any case, what is exactly wrong with this picture? Scientists have simply found a way for a woman who carries mitochondrial diseases to have a child who is biologically hers. We're only fixing a disease, right?

Source

Let's start at the beginning: We have here a child conceived via IVF. IVF has many serious moral and practical implications. First of all, the success rate is rather poor and it's really, really expensive.  It also creates a life at the expense of others. Life starts at conception, right? Well, more lives are being conceived during IVF than ever see the inside of the mother's womb. The main reason why the Church does not approve of IVF, however, is that it separates sex from procreation. It turns procreation into something that is done impersonally in a lab. To read more, I recommend an article by one of my fellow Ignitum Today columnists, Bernard Toutounji. 

Source

Problemo numero dos: A child's DNA is being messed with. A scholar interviewed by CNN in the original article points out: It crosses "the line that will eventually lead to a eugenic designer baby market." There are already ways for a woman to avoid passing her mitochondrial disease to her children in using a donated egg (see next problem below). The only thing this insures is that the child is genetically related to her. It is laudable to want to spare your child the pain of mitochondrial disease, but where do we draw the line? Let's say, someday scientist link being left-handed to a gene. Well, it's a right-hand world, so let's fix it. And my family needs more boys, so let's mess with the DNA to make sure I don't have any girls. And then we look at places like China with their one child policy and we see where this dystopia is heading. 

Egg donation: Directive 40:

Heterologous fertilization (that is, any technique used to achieve conception by the use of gametes coming from at least one donor other than the spouses) is prohibited because it is contrary to the covenant of marriage, the unity of the spouses, and the dignity proper to parents and the child.

It's a form of infidelity to use someone other than your spouse to have kids. It degrades the other person by using their gametes as a tool. It's degrading to the child who does not have the opportunity to be raised by their biological parent.

Sometimes it seems as if we forget that children are human beings. They are not commodities. They are not the property of their parents. No one has the right to have a child at all costs. Children are human beings. They are gifts from God made in His image with incalculable dignity. We have the responsibility to raise them, shelter them, feed them, and keep them free from diseases. Yes, it is our moral imperative to keep our child healthy, but not to the expense of others.

Boycott MSNBC

I'm done. This is it. I'm politically liberal, but I am sick and tired of people on my side-of-the-fence's pro-abortion rhetoric. Watch this:


I would ask her to listen to herself. She is judging a being, that she admits has the potential to someday be a person, based on how much a financial burden they are. So, to her, people are only worth how much they can produce? How much of a financial burden they are?

Let's expand this logic. There are there are over 1.5 million people living in long term care facilities in the US. They don't have jobs. Many of them are not mentally or physically capable of work. I'm sure it costs quite a bit to keep them all alive between the room and board and all the medications. Using her logic, why don't we kill them all?

There are 8.7 million Americans unable to work due to disabilities. If they are not a drain on their family's resources, they are clearly a drain on the government. Why don't we kill all of them too?

Oh, that's right. Because killing the disabled or the elderly is murder.

She says that the belief that the fertilized egg is a person is just that, a belief. So apparently science can tell us when life begins? Science cannot tell us definitively when life ends, how can science tell us when it begins? Life is the ultimate mystery. No one will ever be able to figure out exactly how it works. No one knows where it comes from or where it ends because newborn babies don't talk and, except for maybe that Jesus guy, no one has ever come back from the grave. This is purely the realm of philosophy and religion. Science cannot touch it, just like science cannot touch God.

Her junk science is judging, at the very least, a unique grouping of human cells to only be worth as much as it can be worth on the marketplace. It is putting a financial value on life. Regardless of your beliefs on when life begins, you must see the inherent immorality of such a judgement. It is morally repugnant to judge anyone, even a "potential human," based on their economic usefulness.

I know that life starts at conception, but even if I ignore that fact, Melissa Harris-Perry's logic is dangerous and deeply morally flawed.

I stopped watching CNN a while back because they had one "journalist" who had clearly forgotten how to do an appropriate interview. Now, between this and Toure, I will no longer be watching MSNBC. I only watch FOX NEWS sometimes for the humor; I can't believe rational, intelligent people actually believe some of the spin on that channel. So, I guess I'll start reading the newspaper?

A Religious Person's Response to the Premiere Episode of "Curiosity"

In a special event Saturday night, all the channels under the "Discovery" umbrella showed the first episode of a new series "Curiosity." It seems as if the series is based on viewers submitting questions and they take an hour-long show to explore it. The first question is one of the ultimate questions, "Did God create the universe?" Fortunately, or unfortunately (depending on how you see it), they used the work of Stephen Hawking to delve into the issue at hand.

Being the religions nerd I am, as soon as I heard God, I had to DVR it. So I did, and I watched it yesterday. I gave myself a day for my thoughts to form into some sort of coherency and here it is:

There only continues to be a conflict between science and religion because the extremists on both sides insist there must be one. People who worship at the altar of science seem to have a compulsion to break down religion, to prove religion is false. Meanwhile, people who are obsessed with their religion seem to need to insult science whenever they can, to bash new discoveries and refuse to listen to new ideas. And then there are folks like me in the middle who just don't see what all the fuss is about. Science can't prove or disprove God. Religion can't nullify all scientific inquiry or discovery (although there needs to be a reservation for judgment when it comes to the morality of some scientific progress, but that's another topic).

In showing the "history" of the conflict between science and religion, Curiosity rehashed the old story of Galileo (which the Pope apologized for a few years back) and also mentioned Pope John XXI. According to Stephen Hawking, Pope John XXI met an ironic fate, denouncing science and then dying due to gravity and a crumbling building. I don't know where this accusation comes from. I can't find any reference to any denouncing of science by John XXI anywhere. John XXI was a physician. He asked for an extra room to have a quiet place to study medicine. How could a scientist denounce science?

In the last half hour of the program, we get to the nuts and bolts of Stephen Hawking's ideas. He points out that quantum mechanics shows that sub-atomic particles can and do appear out of nowhere and disappear just as mysteriously. Based on this, he postulates that the Big Bang could also appear out of nowhere. He shows that time did not exist prior to the Big Bang. God could not create the universe, according to him, because there was no time for God to exist in. I have two problems with this simple "proof" for the non-existence of a creator God.

1) It limits God. Is God really limited to the laws of nature? Is God really limited to our concept of time? I feel very uncomfortable saying "God can't do something." I don't even feel comfortable saying "God can't sin." In this "proof," Hawking seems to be running on the assumption that God is some sort of physical being that is ruled by all the laws that we are. I don't see God in such simplistic terms.

2) Where is nowhere? Okay, I admit, quantum mechanics does challenge our human assumption of cause-and-effect. We assume that everything has to come from somewhere, that everything has to have a cause. But I ask him, where is your imagination? Do you really hit a brick wall? Are you forced to say the universe comes from nowhere?

In the end, he says he is grateful for the time he gets to see the beauty of the universe. I ask, "Who are you saying 'thank you' to?"

I want to end this post with a story I've heard a million times:

"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries." - Robert Jastrow