Embryo screening ethics

Read this article about how a husband and wife created eleven embryos, screening for a breast cancer causing gene (one that is truly persistent and life threatening), selecting the embryo for implantation that was guaranteed to not have the gene. This is not casually done, since the woman's family has suffered from cancer due to this gene effect.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article4232383.ece

***
OK, now let's cut through the spewing from both sides. One side will be very alarmed at the ethics and "playing God" factor. The other side will hate on the "religious Bible thumping" side thinking they want the little babies to have cancer. Sheesh.

I'm not going to render an easy formula for you to follow; that's the challenge of humanity, to decide how to continue being humans. But I will tell you that you cannot solve the problem without realizing one factor.

Read this snip from the article:

“We had been through his sister being ill, so it was something we had seen first hand. I thought this was something I had to try because, if we had a daughter with the gene, and she was ill, I couldn’t look her in the face and say I didn’t try.”

This is the mother saying she would feel guilty if she had a baby who developed the cancer, who then as an adult, the mother would have to tell her that she could have cured it but didn't try. Er, um, you wouldn't have that conversation. The child that would have had the cancer is now not going to be born or be alive at all. It's not like you did a body swap for the same person. You've decided not to let the person who would have the cancer become alive at all, in order to have a completely separate and different sibling be the one chosen to become alive. You can't have an imaginary conversation with the child that you decided not to have at all.

Now, I'm not being hard on the mother, but if we are to have this ethics discussion at all, people need to have a clue that they are not talking about a "cure." They are opting not to bring to life a person who has this gene. They are opting to bring to life a sibling who does not have the gene. It's not like you did a body and soul swap to "cure" the cancer in the baby you would have had anyway. That's biological idiocy, and understandable in how the mother needs to rationalize her decision in her own heart, but people who plan to have a thoughtful discussion on either side of the issue need realize that the embryo "not selected" is the entire life not lived. People may decide they can live with that kind of system for truly dire genetic conditions, but they need to be factual about it and not romanticize it.

I really hope that she is not so spiritually unaware that she thinks God has one and only soul hovering in the waiting room while she chooses an embryo, and that one soul goes into the "chosen cancer free body." Um, nope, that does not happen. Each of those embryos would have received their own individual selected soul (selected by God) upon each one coming to life. God doesn't set aside a soul to give to the next available body. So when that embryo was not selected, that soul would never come to life. Instead, a soul just for the embryo that is selected comes to life. So she'd not be having the cozy chat with the "soul that would have been born anyway" telling her offspring that she made sure "that soul got a cancer gene free body." Nope.