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Genetic Screening of Embryos to be “Regulated” by Health Canada

Eugenic killing of ‘defective’ embryos certain to follow screening tests

OTTAWA October 5, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The Health Canada is ready to take the next step towards implementing Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where eugenics rules and only the perfect live. A Health Canada media release announced that it would be considering providing IVF facilities with guidelines for preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) of embryos.

PGD involves allowing newly created in vitro embryos to grow to a certain stage, removing one of their cells and examining it for genetic “flaws” that might lead to illnesses or imperfections such as cystic fibrosis or Down’s Syndrome. Proponents of PGD say it not only “screens out” potential genetic problems in children at the embryonic stage, but it increases the chances of carrying a pregnancy to term for older women.

The catch is, however, that “screening” does not mean curing, but instead a eugenic selection, after which the embryonic child not selected is killed or used for research.

Campaign Life Coalition, (CLC), said that the procedure “exposes our callous disregard for human life.” CLC’s National President, Jim Hughes, said, “While we have compassion for couples with genetic problems, the wanton disposal of human beings and their use as experimental ‘guinea pigs’ is appalling,”

As with most new reproductive technologies (NRT), the uses of selection does not stop at killing the “unfit,” but is now used to select for “donor siblings,” those children created and grown specifically to serve as tissue farms for sick siblings or parents.

Health Canada justifies pro-life objections to in vitro fertilization when it places the child firmly in the category of a commercial commodity that can be “used.” “The child born as a result can then be used as a source of compatible tissue, either from umbilical cord blood or bone marrow, for the affected child,” says a soon-to-be published Health Canada document.

PGD has raised old spectres of the early 20th century eugenics movement that proposed to create a more “perfect” human race, free of congenital problems. Health Canada confirms these fears with its suggestion that PGD could be used to predict late-onset diseases such as cancer. Health Canada spokesman Bill Maga says the department plans to introduce PGD regulations in May.

In the months leading up to the passage of the Canadian Reproductive Technologies law, CLC lobbyists repeatedly warned legislators of the error of thinking that the expected regulations would do anything to stop the outrages against embryonic human life.

“Human beings are not created for the purpose of tissue and organs for another person,” said Mary Ellen Douglas, National organizer of Campaign Life Coalition. “This is the Pandora’s Box which Bill C-6 opened when it allowed embryo experimentation and gave the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) a green light.”

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