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Illegal Beings: Human Clones
What's a good reason to have a baby?
libfemme ( 05/07/2004, 01:49:10 )Five healthy babies have been born to provide stem cells for siblings with serious non-heritable conditions. This is the first time "saviour siblings" have been created to treat children whose condition is not genetic, says the medical team. Through out the ages babies have been conceived to provide a male heir to property or power or to go into the family business, to exploit, to have someone take care of the parents in old age, to fullfil a woman's destiny/career as mother, or to prove a man's manhood, to replace children who have died or been disowned, to give to the church, to fulfill family expectations, etc, etc. and then there is just the old fashion reason of wanting a baby to love. Some reasons may turn out to be good reasons. Some may not. But from the child's point of view, why they were conceived is irrelevant. They are here now and would not be had not their parents taken the steps they did.Five babies recently were born after a technique called preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) was used to test the embryos for a tissue type match to the ailing siblings. The purpose of choosing tissue matches was to provide stem cells for transplantation to children who are suffering from leukaemia and a rare condition called Diamond-Blackfan anaemia (DBA).Trying to conceive a child naturally as a tissue match for a sick sibling has only a one in five chance, but using PGD leads to a 96% chance of success. The article in the New Scientists also said "...can also lead to terminations where the foetus is not a tissue match for the sibling."Now this surprised me because they changed from the word embryo to the word foetus and the two stages are very different. An embryo is anything from 5 seconds after fertilization when it is one cell up to about 12 weeks when it is still largely unformed. It is not a foetus until after the 12th week.But it the PGD technique is used on embryo's, presumably before implantion, you should know before implantation whether or not the embryo is a match. If it is not, then don't implant it. Freeze it for later use or destroy it.Why would you ever implant it only to abort it later as not being a match? This makes no sense. Now it doesn't matter to me at what stage the embryo is terminated, except for the affect that has on the mother's emotional and physical well being. However, the words embryo and foetus have great emotional impact on a portion of the public. Some people are only to eager to jump to hysterical conclusions about genetic engineering in any case. There is no need to fuel the fire with inaccurate language.Oh, well the article is interesting anyway. You can find the story on several other news sources as well.
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