Wednesday, January 25, 2012

building babies

I love reading the paper - love the weekend Globe and Mail - I can't sit and read the whole thing in one session, but I like pouring through it on a Saturday/Sunday and catching up.  I went to a conference in 2009 and met this guy who said the best thing he ever started doing was reading the paper every day.  Now I tried to do that but I just can't keep up - the Globe is huge and I'm totally a slow reader - getting through the weekend one is enough... in any case... I tend to keep articles that I went to spend more time on and now I want to share one with you from Jan 7.

They profiled building babies - building better babies.  I'm torn on what to think about this article.  Wait, that's a lie.  I think it is wrong.  There it is.  Wrong.  But there is a piece of me on the fence about a few things.

What's the story - basically scientists can now profile DNA and take away elements that might (might) lead to disease or disability (disability only in the minds of some... what... what am I talking about - watch this video about autism - it is shocking and it has changed my mind about a lot of things) What this means is parents can get faulty parts of DNA removed so children don't get specific diseases, abnormalities, etc and at some point down the road - can work on things like height and all kinds of other things - engineering perfection - hardly - but it feels like that is the intent.

Tell us how you really feel - well... I kind of think all of the shit we are getting as humans is caused by us - and I mean human kind when I say us - no one wants a disease and no one sets out to get a disease - but we are consuming so much more - we are pumping harmful things into our environments - have these diseases always existed - likely not - have we caused some of them from the foods we eat and lifestyles that we live - I think, yes.

This has taken me ages to write tonight.  I've come back to this post over and over again because I'm so - arg and rrrrrr and blah.  Some will say this is prevention and prevention is what the medical system aims for - we want to stop things before they happen and again - no one wants to be sick, but I just don't feel good about this.

When I was given the chance to test if the guys had down syndrome or other chromosome diseases I said no - because I would love them no matter what.  Now for parents who live with disease with their children they would likely love to take that away for their children and give them a "normal" life but my worry in this, that when we extract something from our DNA what are we doing - will we create something worse - I don't think we've done enough homework to understand what we are messing around with and maybe the scientists will say we have done enough homework.

I could go on and on about this, but I'm totally bagged and I feel like this deserves more of my brain cells to make a proper argument.  Let me know what you think - I'm quite interested on the opinions around this.

I'll close with this - I feel like a better parent after watching just a minute of that damned Toddlers and Tiaras - what the hell is that - why is that popular - why are we sexualizing our children - WHY?  SIGH!!!!!!

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