Scientific Advance: Please God, Make It Stop
This is what the culture of death has turned me into, a flat earth anti-science reactionary shouting at the world stop!
I was perusing one of my favorite websites MIT’s Technology Review. Today I ran across an article that said that researchers are making substantial progress in the very early detection of some diseases. In a sane world that would elicit joy, but not so in this case. These scientists are close to developing a genetic screening test that could detect genetic diseases in the unborn very early in a pregnancy.
Ever since the discovery that a pregnant woman’s blood contains traces of her baby’s DNA, researchers have been looking for ways to screen that DNA for genetic abnormalities. A new test developed by Stephen Quake and his colleagues at Stanford University takes us one step closer to a noninvasive blood test to diagnose disorders like Down syndrome in a fetus.
The new test uses powerful DNA sequencing techniques to amplify short fragments of a baby’s DNA from its mother’s blood, and to map the chromosomes. The method reveals the extra copies of chromosomes–aneuploidy–characteristic of certain genetic disorders, including Down syndrome, in which there are three copies of chromosome 21 rather than two.
“Now we’re getting closer to the time when there will be not a screening test but a definitive noninvasive test,” says Joe Leigh Simpson of Florida International University. Simpson wasn’t involved in Quake’s work.
My reaction upon reading this was profound sadness. This “advance” will likely be used to insure that the few babies with Down Syndrome and other genetic disorders who now live will never see the light of day in the not so distant future. Today, some 93% of babies with Down Syndrome are aborted. Advances such as these will only increase the likelihood that this number will get even closer to 100%.
The tragedy of each and every one of those deaths is compounded by effects on society of liquidation of the imperfect. It no longer takes the imagination of a science fiction writer to imagine a world where stricter and stricter definitions of perfection result in the indifferent filtration of the flawed by the millions.
No, horror stories like this are no longer the relegated to the domain of the imagination but are staples of our increasingly revoltingly reality.
The culture of death has brought me to this place where I read of scientific advance and pray “Please God, make it stop!”