Grave New World
Doctors screened out from the woman's embryos an inherited gene that would have left the baby with a greater than 50% chance of developing the cancer.
The woman decided to have her embryos screened because her husband had tested positive for the gene and his sister, mother, grandmother and cousin have all had the cancer.
The couple produced 11 embryos, of which five were found to be free from the gene. Two of these were implanted in the woman's womb and she is now 14 weeks pregnant.
By screening out embryos carrying the gene, called BRCA-1, the couple, from London, will eliminate the hereditary disease from their lineage.
Dawn Eden writes that British Docs are saying breast-cancer patients should never be born. My own mother died from breast cancer so I am well aware of the suffering that comes from this disease, but this is not only the wrong approach it is an evil approach.
There is another tragedy here that society just totally ignores. Eleven persons were created. Six persons were killed for not being good enough. Three were presumably put into cold storage to more than likely to also be killed some day. Two embryos get a chance to continue living with the hope that just one survives. This is so callous and cruel that it just drives me to prayer. Dawn Eden also writes:
There is a difference, and I am afraid we may find out about it too late. Unless good people speak up, insurance companies will continue to pressure doctors to pressure women to undergo procedures such as this, as with preimplantation genetic diagnosis for Down syndrome and other conditions that would be costly to treat. In time, those women who do have breast cancer or other "eliminable" hereditary diseases may come to be seen as "useless eaters."
It won't be long before the movie Gattaca is no longer a cautionary tale, but a reality. The Eugenicists are back and this time they will be supported by the insurance companies.
Known as 
Yes, all of this is dismal and completely immoral and unethical. It's also silly and a tremendous waste of money. Oooh, your baby may possibly not develop breast cancer (although I would point out that most women with breast cancer do NOT have the BRCA1 gene - a whopping 2 to 3% of women with breast cancer in the US have a BRCA1 gene mutation, I believe, and 1 in 8 women develop breast cancer throughout their lives). What about everything else out there?
If the implanted embryo(s) survive, they may still develop breast cancer unrelated to the gene. They may also someday die of colon cancer, pancreatic cancer, skin cancer, leukemia, E. coli, SIDS, or some parasite they pick up on a college trip to the rain forest. Or they might be hit by a bus. Or they may be born with cystic fibrosis or some hereditary metabolic disease undetectable by ultrasound and not screened for routinely during preimplantation genetic diagnosis. You cannot control all of nature, people, and we are all going to die someday.
While I sympathize with the couple wanting to spare themselves and their family the pain of watching a loved one die of breast cancer (a pain their family history tells me they know all too well), I can look at my own children, knowing fully that any one of them may carry a deadly gene mutation, and still be thrilled at their lives, their personalities, WHO THEY ARE. And I cannot imagine NOT knowing them, or ever making the decision that a defective gene means they should not get the chance to live, love and be loved, groan at my bad jokes, jump on the bed, or swim in the ocean.
As I sat with my own aunt while she was dying of breast cancer at the ripe old age of 40, I wondered to myself if it was worth it. I didn't even have to ask - she told me herself that it was. What are we playing at here?
Jeff, I've been tracing the "Culture of Death"'s origin.
Believe or not, the enemy is Buddhism. The concept of "anatta," or no-self/soul, was imported from the East during the Imperialist era.
You see, the first principles of Secularism and Buddhism are absolutely identical. Later, I'll elaborate on this more. I'm preparing a report on the subject, but unfortunately it won't be ready for at least a few months.
These three articles will give you an idea of what we're up against:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03028b.htm
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/khema/bl095.html
http://www.angelfire.com/electronic/awakening101/noself.html
In a nutshell, traditional (Theravada) Buddhism holds the view that conscious life is a burden, and thus not worth living. It also teaches that true happiness is to be had only in a state similar to dreamless sleep, free from all desires, free from all conscious action. The perfect death; also called the state of undying.
Buddhism takes for granted the Upanishad doctrine of an endless chain of rebirths, but they differ from pantheistic Brahminism both in their attitude towards the Vedas (Hindu sacred texts) and in their plan for securing freedom from rebirth and from conscious existence. Actually, the differences Buddhists and Hindus, at least concerning salvation, are quite trivial and mostly a matter of semantics.
Modern Secularism is just a slightly mutated version of Buddhism. As Buddha rejected the existence of a soul, and posited that all things are in constant fluxuation, churned by nonrational and unknowable causes, his doctrine of endless rebirth is exactly the same as the concept of random material evolution.
Only a person's karma, or actions, affect the future forms that person's matter assumes. There is no continuity of personhood though, because it is merely accidental. In other words, there is no such thing as something that makes you uniquely you. There is no experiencer, only experience. There is nothing aware of being aware, only awareness.
Secularism has gone a step further than Buddhism by asserting that Nirvana (literally "extinguishing the flame") is inevitable, and happens to each one of us at the conclusion of our lives.
Whereas Buddhists long for soul-death (killing the delusion that there is some kind of a spiritual being in their essence), Secularists have more trouble longing to perish, due to remnant Judeo-Christian influences.
A primary theme in Secularism is leading a life with minimal suffering. However, since Nirvana is inevitable and does not have to be attained through hard work, there is no concept of unselfish sacrifice in modern thought. There is such a concept in traditional Buddhism, though.
So, this is what we're up against: People who are very much afraid of death, but who hold a philosophy proclaiming death to be synonymous with paradise and the ultimate end of man.
Keep this fact in mind, and it will allow you to understand the inherent conflict in our "Culture of Death," and the sometimes bizzare and paradoxical results that conflict produces.
In a single sentence, this is the core teaching of Secularism: Stop all suffering; attain the perfect death. This teaching is also at the heart of traditional Buddhism.
An important point to help you understand why our opponents consider death desirable: Christians define evil as a lack of good; Buddhists define good as a lack of evil.
If you understand the difference between these two points of view, you'll understand the "Culture of Death."
Your comment about the insurance company was the same thought I had when I read a story this week from LifesiteNews about a man who committed suicide after his insurance company denied him a certain type of cancer treatment. My first thought was that this is one of the situations that will make insurance companies take a look at the "cost benefits" of not covering certain remedies - like drug treatments - and only covering euthanasia.
When I hear things like this the little girl inside my head cries, "Mommy. I want to go home."
"An important point to help you understand why our opponents consider death desirable: Christians define evil as a lack of good; Buddhists define good as a lack of evil."
If you travel the New Age version of Buddhism, (and perhaps farther into Buddhism itself) there is no evil. All is a matter of perception. One has only to reform his mind to understand that all is good. There is no need, then, for God. ALL is nothing.
Scary stuff, ultimately, except that it isn't easy to reach the "enlightened" state where all becomes clear. A blessing!
On the other hand, if one doesn't run down to the end of the Buddhist road, the Buddhists themselves do have much wisdom and beauty to offer. If only we could recognize the exact moments when Buddhism conflicts with truth so that our souls would not be compromised, fellowship would be much easier. Perhaps this is why brilliant people of faith (not gullible sympathetic folks like me) succeed at interfaith dialog.
I'm just outraged and saddened every time I hear something like this, especially while also thinking about my friends, family and acquaintances who just don't seem to get how bad things have gotten these days, and who wear "liberal" as a badge of honor.
Yes, we need to do something and stand up to this--but how? What do I do, write my insurance company now, to tell them what I think about these possible future scenarios? That would seem ineffective. Ideas, anyone? What do we do, who do we write, what do we write...?
To be frank, the symptoms of the Culture of Death have their roots in contraception. Unless we address the source, acceptance of contraception, we're going to continue to see the symptoms we're seeing today, though maybe not simultaneously in any single culture: abortion, euthanasia, acceptance of same-sex relations, and even on to polygamy, bestiality and whatever else. The reason I don't think we're going to gain much ground by "standing up" to the worst symptoms of the Culture of Death is because we'd need to attack the root, and attacking contraception is not feasible in today's society without some sort of drastic societal upheaval (which will probably be violent and embrace monumental suffering).
Anyone who hasn't read Contraception: Why Not? by Dr. Janet E. Smith, ought to give it a read. Besides pamphlets for sale, the text is also copied in various places around the web.
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