Genetic Testing - Playing God or Playing Smart?

Genetic Testing-Playing God or Playing Smart?

Imagine you are a parent of a very sick young child who's only chance of survival is to genetically produce a future child who would be a perfect and compatible donor for this sibling. Would you adhere to this? What if the donor child would have to continuously support its sibling by donating its blood, bone marrow, whatever would be needed for the rest of their life? There are so many different scenarios parents and doctors face regarding a chronically ill child who requires a perfect match of a donor to save their life. Even if the sick child already has siblings or family members willing to donate, many times they are not compatible enough. This is when the parents must make very difficult and life-changing decisions that will affect their whole family.

There are different ways doctors go about this if the parents decide to genetically produce a perfect donor child for their other sick child. The first is called prenatal genetic diagnosis, which is when an embryo is tested for genetic abnormalities and to see if it is a match for the sick child. Many times, selective abortion takes place after this genetic testing. Because it is so hard to conceive a perfect donor match by chance, many fetuses are aborted since they would not be a compatible match for the sick child. This raises many ethical and moral questions, as well as physical and emotional distress to the parents.

Many religious groups, pro-life groups, and many other people are quire against these practices for many reasons. Some claim that doctors are trying to play God by choosing which fetus to bring to life. Because Catholicism considers a human life to start at conception ("The Modern Catholic Church believes that God creates a soul for a person at conception" www.home.honolulu.hawaii.edu/~pine/phil100/preimplant2.htm), many conservative Christian groups view this procedure as inhumane or immoral, because the child is not being created by actual conception. To these people, they then ask themselves-how would God create a soul for that child without any actual conception? Again, this is just an example of one religious group.

Many doctors look at this new technique of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis to be a fantastic benefit, medical-wise. It can eliminate the chance of a fetus contracting a specific deformity or disease that the parent may carry a gene of and through normal conception, would most likely pass that on to their child. There are many diseases, such as hemophilia, where one sex will get the disease and the other will carry the gene for that disease. With hemophilia, daughters of a woman carrier have a 50% chance themselves to be carriers and sons will have a 50% chance of becoming affected by the disease. With this new technique, those chances can not only be greatly reduced, but actually diminished.

Before the technique of pre-implantation