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I Not many years ago, the theme of “creation of life” would have suggested a discussion of the evolutionary process that brought life into being on this planet or of God’s act of creation. Even when I was asked to speak on this topic for this conference, I felt the need to check to see …
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“People will be inclined to give their children those skills and traits that align with their own temperaments and lifestyles,” writes Gregory Stock, an apostle of human genetic engineering who heads the program on Medicine, Technology and Society at UCLA. “A devout individual may want his child to be even more religious and resistant to …
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BOOK REVIEW: Children of Choice: Freedom and the New Reproductive Technology. By John A. Robertson. Princeton University Press, 296 pp., $29.95. The explosion of progress in reproductive technologies is creating new choices in baby-making. Fertile women can stop baby-making with Norplant, RU486 or abortion, while infertile couples can make babies with the help of artificial …
Continue reading “Designer Children: The Market World of Reproductive Choice”
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The human Genome Initiative, begun modestly in 1988, will expand to a $200 million-a-year project by 1993 and continue into the next century. To the scientific-minded, this effort to understand the human genetic package is exploding with excitement. To the cautious naysayers, however, it entangles us in a net of unsolvable ethical and legal conundrums. …
Continue reading “Genethics: Implications of the Human Genome Project”
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A handful of theologians were among the thousands of attendants at the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science held in Boston. There leading geneticists from the National Academy of Science’s research council promoted a federal project known as "mapping the human genome. The subject matter of that project is less …
Continue reading “Genetics and Theology: A Complementarity?”
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Among the stories, many no doubt apocryphal, told about George Bernard Shaw is one in which the dancer Isadora Duncan suggests to Shaw that they should have a baby, saying, "Think of a child with my body and your mind." "Ah," replies Shaw, "but suppose it had my body and your mind." This is in …
Continue reading “Mastering Our Gen(i)es: When Do We Say No?”
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Among the many compelling reasons for religious people to engage science is the human tendency to base our worldviews on the prevailing physics of the day. Our governments, our schools, our economies and our churches all reflect our understanding of how the world works, and when that understanding changes — as it is changing right …
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In the sixteenth century, the Reformed theologian John Calvin wrote this about childbirth: Although it is by the operation of natural causes that infants come into the world … yet therein the wonderful providence of God brightly shines forth. This miracle, it is true, because of its ordinary occurrence, is made less account of by …
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Book Review: Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge of Bioethics. By Leon R. Kass. Encounter, 300 pp. When people remember the l960s they usually think of Vietnam, cultural upheaval and assorted liberation movements. But the ‘60s should also be remembered as the time when postwar medical technology blossomed. The decade witnessed the …
Continue reading “Slippery Slope: Medical Technology and the Human Future”
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The controversial "Baby M" case and the recent Vatican document on "respect for human life and its origins" have prompted many in the religious world to face the ethical issues raised by the new reproductive technologies. Our understanding of the relationship between sex and procreation has been challenged by heretofore unimagined methods of reproduction. The …
Continue reading “The Religious Response to Reproductive Technology”
