British Children with Squint Eyes Targets of Embryo Testing

God's Warrior · British Children with Squint Eyes Targets of Embryo Testing

British children with ‘squint’ eyes now are targets of embryo testing
By Tom Strode - May 14, 2007
From “The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention”
http://erlc.com/article/life-dige...yes-now-are-targets-of-embryo-tes

Even a child whose eyes don’t look in precisely the same direction has a life not worth living in Great Britain.
A British government agency that regulates fertility issues has granted permission for a London clinic to screen embryos to make sure none with what is known as squint is permitted to be born, according to the BBC. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) issued a license for the clinic to screen out embryos with the condition for a couple in which the father has a severe squint that causes his eyes to look down or sideways. The man’s father also has the condition.
The news marked an ominous milestone—supposedly the first embryo screening for a cosmetic flaw.
Pro-life bioethicists deplored the decision, as did some who normally support the use of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) in life-endangering situations.
Wesley Smith, a bioethics specialist in the United States, bemoaned the slippery slope represented in the HFEA decision.
”We have fallen a long way off the moral cliff in a very short time, from tossing away embryos with genetic defects for serious illness in infancy, to tossing them away because they are the wrong sex, to destroying those with a genetic propensity to adult onset cancer,” Smith wrote on the weblog at bioethics.com. “And now, with the inevitability of sun in summer, embryos in Brave New Britain are [to] be selected out if the future child would have … squinted.”
David King, director of Human Genetics Alert and a molecular biologist, said, according to BBC News, “I really do think that this has gone a good deal too far because this condition, despite being, admittedly, perhaps somewhat disabling doesn’t shorten life in any way. The HFEA has ignored public opinion and has ignored its own rules which say that PGD should only be allowed for serious medical conditions.”
The director of the London Bridge Fertility, Gynaecology and Genetics Centre, which gained the license from the HFEA, told BBC News it was more than a cosmetic condition.
“Whereas we all know somebody who’s got a squint, in this particular condition the muscles that control the gaze of direction of the eyes are grossly abnormal, so the gaze of the eye might be 90 degrees different from the direction which one might be looking, so to speak, the direction of one’s face,” Gedis Grudzinskas said.
Grudzinskas is not opposed to using PGD for cosmetic reasons, however.
“We will increasingly see the use of embryo screening for severe cosmetic conditions,” he said, according to The Telegraph, a British online newspaper.
The clinic director said he would be willing to try for permission to test for any genetic factor that would produce severe distress in a family.
When asked about hair color, Grudzinskas said, “If there is a cosmetic aspect to an individual case I would assess it on its merits. [Hair color] can be a cause of bullying which can lead to suicide. With the agreement of the HFEA, I would do it.
“If a parent suffered from asthma, and it was possible to detect the genetic factor for this, I would do it,” he told The Telegraph. “It all depends on the family’s distress.”
Smith wrote, “Notice that it isn’t even about the future born individual anymore.”
Squint is a condition in which one eye can be looking in the direction in which a person is facing and the other eye is looking up, down, left or right.
PGD is a method in which a cell is removed from an eight-cell embryo and tested for a variety of genetic conditions.