Redefining Conception: Eugenics & Playing God

A story Friday at the BBC News online makes two points abundantly clear for the observant viewer.

First, the eugenics bandwagon is back in a big way, bigger even than in the days of the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler.

Second, BBC and other media are attempting to re-craft the definition of "conception."

The first baby in the UK tested before conception for a genetic form of breast cancer has been born.

Doctors at University College London said the girl and her mother were doing well following the birth this week. The embryo was screened for the altered BRCA1 gene, which would have meant the girl had a 80% chance of developing breast cancer.

Women in three generations of her husband's family have been diagnosed with the disease in their 20s. Paul Serhal, the fertility expert who treated the couple, said: "This little girl will not face the spectre of developing this genetic form of breast cancer or ovarian cancer in her adult life. The parents will have been spared the risk of inflicting this disease on their daughter.

This all sounds wonderful, doesn't it unless you believe that human life begins at conception (where else could it begin?) and that the little girl would have been destroyed if tests had shown she had the gene. In point of fact, we are not told in the article whether this was the first embryo tested or one of several.

But wait, the BBC helpfully explains how the doctors get around this moral dilemma:

Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) involves taking a cell from an embryo at the eight-cell stage of development, when it is around three-days old, and testing it.

This is before conception - defined as when the embryo is implanted in the womb. (Emphasis: OTB)

Doctors then select an embryo free from rogue genes to continue the pregnancy, and discard any whose genetic profile points to future problems.

Well, isn't that hunky dory! Even though sperm and egg have united and there is growth of the embryo, these scientists - with BBC approval - are claiming that conception doesn't really take place until implantation. Thus they justify each of their actions, including the deliberate destruction of living human embryos, by redefining a bedrock fact of biology.

Well, saying so doesn't make it so. Implantation is the important docking stage of early life where the embryo establishes its life-support system with its mother. When this process fails naturally it is a miscarriage (and this happens in nature frequently enough, though the mother may not even realize it). When it fails because of birth control pills or by other artificial means it is an abortion, though few people like to think of it this way.

The BBC is not alone in its acceptance of the redefinition of conception. I went to the online Merriam-Webster dictionary and it defines it as "the process of becoming pregnant involving fertilization or implantation, or both." Oddly it doesn't say "what" is being fertilized or implanted. So the Brave New World'ers have gotten to Old Mr. Webster too.

Words used to mean things, and reporters used to have hard-nosed editors who wouldn't let them get away with shoddy reporting in which doctors should be asked why they have redefined conception. In a few more years there won't be any of us old newspaper curmudgeons left to point this out, and the process of playing God can go on unabated.