Tuesday, October 28, 2003
what has our society come to?
with the advent of all the genetic manipulations that i agree have a great benefit and will revolutionize medicine, comes a fine line of messing with nature. i just heard a commercial on the radio for a fertility clinic advertising for couples to preselect the gender of their child. here is also an article on the subject. i've known that they've had the ability to do this for a long time now. and it's primarily to prevent certain sex-linked genetic diseases in offspring. but to choose your child's gender for "family-balancing" or just because you want a girl or a boy? i think it's the beginning of the end.
remember the movie GATTACA? where they had a society where couples bred by selecting exactly what kinds of traits they want to their children to have. they chose the best traits and you ended up with "perfect" kids. those who bred naturally ended up with kids with imperfections like nearsightedness. these imperfect beings were shunned from society and given low-level jobs like being the janitor. that's what this gender selection could ultimately lead to.
as the article posed, selecting for the gender of your child will lead to gender discrimination. and it may have impact on the population of the world too. if people start selecting for more males, there will be fewer females having children. if they select for females, there will be too few males to choose from. and even if this is too farfetched to think about, i think it's too real to just dismiss.
[an aside: i think people would select to have boys more than girls. i heard somewhere that it costs $14,000 a year more to raise a girl than a boy. plus, socially, boys get more opportunities and get paid better than girls. eventhough the gender line is more blurred now than before, there is still a glass ceiling that women hit in most professions. economically, it's just more beneficial to have a boy.]
and then there's the spiritual aspect of it. i believe that with all of our shortcomings and talents, we're all meant to have exactly that, nothing more or less. everyone's got their own challenges and they're for us to deal with. i wouldn't want all my negative characteristics genetically selected against because i think they've made me stronger and i've developed a way to cope and handle difficulty because of my shortcomings. i don't think we have any right to be fooling with God's work. just like abortion, we don't have any right to fool around with life. and i know there will be people making all kinds of pro-choice/pro-life arguments here. i'm not trying to make some dramatic statement about abortion or anything, but i just wonder what great things those babies may have been meant to do or perform in life had they had the chance to do it. i'm always thinking about missed opportunities and talk about missing an opportunity...at life! but anyway, i digress...
people are meant to have the gifts, talents, and shortcomings that they have. somehow, to cure diseases, fine. or even to select for a certain gender in order to avoid a child with disease, fine (although it's pretty borderline). but to select just because you want to have a boy vs. a girl? it has too many repercussions to think about. and maybe that's the entire problem- that people don't think about the repercussions of their actions.
remember the movie GATTACA? where they had a society where couples bred by selecting exactly what kinds of traits they want to their children to have. they chose the best traits and you ended up with "perfect" kids. those who bred naturally ended up with kids with imperfections like nearsightedness. these imperfect beings were shunned from society and given low-level jobs like being the janitor. that's what this gender selection could ultimately lead to.
as the article posed, selecting for the gender of your child will lead to gender discrimination. and it may have impact on the population of the world too. if people start selecting for more males, there will be fewer females having children. if they select for females, there will be too few males to choose from. and even if this is too farfetched to think about, i think it's too real to just dismiss.
[an aside: i think people would select to have boys more than girls. i heard somewhere that it costs $14,000 a year more to raise a girl than a boy. plus, socially, boys get more opportunities and get paid better than girls. eventhough the gender line is more blurred now than before, there is still a glass ceiling that women hit in most professions. economically, it's just more beneficial to have a boy.]
and then there's the spiritual aspect of it. i believe that with all of our shortcomings and talents, we're all meant to have exactly that, nothing more or less. everyone's got their own challenges and they're for us to deal with. i wouldn't want all my negative characteristics genetically selected against because i think they've made me stronger and i've developed a way to cope and handle difficulty because of my shortcomings. i don't think we have any right to be fooling with God's work. just like abortion, we don't have any right to fool around with life. and i know there will be people making all kinds of pro-choice/pro-life arguments here. i'm not trying to make some dramatic statement about abortion or anything, but i just wonder what great things those babies may have been meant to do or perform in life had they had the chance to do it. i'm always thinking about missed opportunities and talk about missing an opportunity...at life! but anyway, i digress...
people are meant to have the gifts, talents, and shortcomings that they have. somehow, to cure diseases, fine. or even to select for a certain gender in order to avoid a child with disease, fine (although it's pretty borderline). but to select just because you want to have a boy vs. a girl? it has too many repercussions to think about. and maybe that's the entire problem- that people don't think about the repercussions of their actions.
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quotable quotes
-
"To try is to risk failure. But risk must be taken because the
greatest hazard of life is to risk nothing. The person who risks
nothing does nothing, has nothing, is nothing. He may avoid
suffering and sorrow, but he simply cannot learn, feel, change,
grow, live, and love."
~unknown
"It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues."
~ Abraham Lincoln
"live a life that others will remember years from now, NOT because it pointed to you but because of how it pointed to the One who made you."
~ Mark Hart, the Bible Geek
"we grow up learning to become self-reliant, but really we need to be God-reliant"
"we could learn a lot from crayons: some are sharp, some are pretty, some are dull, some have weird names, and all are different colors....but they all exist very nicely in the same box"
"never wound hearts that love u, never give them the endless pain, because wounded hearts are like roses that never bloom"
"there comes a time when we have to stop loving someone not because that person has stopped loving us but because we have found out that they'd be happier if we'd let go"
