Culture Of Life 101… The History Of Future Dreams

By BRIAN CLOWES

(Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For an electronic copy of the complete series on artificial reproduction, e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.)

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“In the year 6565, ain’t gonna need no husband, won’t need your wife, you’ll pick your son, pick your daughter too, from the bottom of a long black tube….” (from the song In the Year 2525).

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I am by nature an optimist, so when Zager and Evans released their song In the Year 2525 in 1969, I hated it upon first hearing it because of its dreary lyrics and dragging pace. I was very interested in science and had heard a little bit about the rudimentary forms of assisted reproduction being proposed at the time. Being a naive teenager, I laughed at the possibility of anything the songwriters mentioned ever becoming true.
I probably would have been horrified to know that the song was eerily prophetic.
Perverse Fantasies. As we have seen, scientists have developed exotic assisted reproductive procedures in order to help couples achieve pregnancy — and back these up with an arsenal of other advanced techniques they use to “screen out” those resulting unborn children who do not meet their exacting standards.
Some of these people are plunging headlong into lines of research that would have been unthinkable back in the 1960s. The science surrounding human reproduction is turning from negative eugenics (screening out the “unfit”) to positive eugenics (taking measures to actually improve humanity beyond a healthy baseline).
In addition to the craving for arcane knowledge, those who populate the darker corners of medical research seem to have long since acquired a dangerously elitist attitude. As one leading researcher boasted way back in 1979, “[Scientists] have the right to exercise their professional activities to the limit as lay attitudes struggle to catch up with what scientists can do.”
Put another way: Standards of ethics and morals have been sacrificed in order to advance this mad dash for knowledge. This philosophy has destroyed all limits, so that now the only rule is: “If it can be done, it must be done, and to Hell with the consequences!”
Where Are We Being Led? The noted French biologist Dr. Jean Rostand wrote in all seriousness nearly half a century ago:
“Here and now Homo Sapiens is in the process of becoming Homo Biologicus, a strange biped that will combine the properties of self reproduction without males, like the green fly; of fertilizing his female at long distance, like the nautiloid mollusk; of changing sex, like the xiphores; of growing from cuttings, like the earthworm; of replacing his missing parts, like the newt; of developing outside his mother’s body, like the kangaroo; and of hibernating, like the hedgehog.”
These are not the mad pipe dreams of some isolated quack. A Midwestern professor of biological sciences has suggested: 1) crossing man with plants, so all we’d need for food would be water and sunlight; 2) developing a servant class of super-smart apes; and 3) best of all, eventually breeding a race of humans only four inches tall, which would greatly lessen pollution and ease pressure on our natural resources (he did not give specifics on how we would deal with housecats, which would become comparatively as large as elephants to such tiny humans).
Another geneticist has predicted that we might breed a race of legless humanoid mutants with prehensile tails or feet for space travel.
Other scientists would like to see women laying eggs that could be hatched or eaten (i.e., use our own young as a food source); human beings with gills to facilitate underwater travel; and people with two sets of arms and hands, one for heavy work, the other for lighter tasks. Some of these scientists are early members of the “transhumanist” movement, which has been in existence for several decades, and is the latest — and possibly ultimate — threat to the inherent dignity of humanity.
A Predictable Trajectory. Assisted reproductive technology is now following a fairly straightforward and predictable path.
A century ago scientists invented artificial insemination, which isolated the male gamete from the body. Then came IVF, which isolated both the male and female gametes. Next was embryo transfer, which removes the developing human being from the body entirely for a short time.
It is easy to project this line of technology to its logical conclusion: Extracorporeal gestation (EG), where technicians conceive a child in a dish (or generate him by parthenogenesis, without sperm) and gestate him entirely outside the mother in an artificial uterus.
This is not science fiction fantasy: Intensive research into EG has been ongoing since 1975. Late-term aborted babies have already been kept alive for days in pressurized vessels. Decades ago, the Italian embryologist Daniele Petrucci claimed to have kept a female embryo alive for 59 days in an artificial uterus.
Three decades ago, many scientists and doctors, including the late reformed abortionist Dr. Bernard Nathanson, believed an artificial womb would soon be perfected. Work in this direction continues. According to the late bioethicist Joseph Fletcher, “The womb is a dark and dangerous place, a hazardous environment. We should want our potential children to be where they can be watched and protected as much as possible.”
Prolific author Isaac Asimov revealed the anti-life thinking behind this technology when he wrote that “if a woman could extrude the fertilized ovum for development outside the body, she would then be no more the victim of pregnancy than a man is.”
A growing number of prominent pro-abortion scientists have already proposed the ultimate scenario that will be achieved by this line of research. In their ideal society, pregnancy will be abolished and everyone will be surgically sterilized by age 18.
Before the sterilization process, however, girls will be super-ovulated and their eggs harvested. Boys will masturbate to produce sperm samples. Scientists will carefully gene map the sperm and eggs, and will discard any samples that are subnormal in any way. When there is a projected need for a scientist 20 years down the road, technicians will be conceive and grow one in an artificial uterus. When there is a projected need for a negotiator, they will grow one. When talented prostitutes are desired, scientists will grow them too.
When reading about these predictions, we must remember that they are not the imaginings of some crackpot conspiracy theorist. They have been outlined in black and white by scientists, gender feminists and thinkers in the forefront of the pro-abortion and assisted reproductive movements — decades ago!
These are serious proposals, not just grist for sci-fi pulp novels. If it were possible to implement these scenarios today, Fletcher and many others who think that pregnancy is “victimization” would do so without hesitation. This colossal arrogance allows the “biocrats” to think that they can go God one (or several) better. They think that they can improve upon His design by bettering the “hazardous environment” that He created and by “weeding out” defective children.
Rendering Men Obsolete. Researchers Dr. Jerry Hall and Dr. Yan Ling Fen of the Institute for Reproductive Medicine and Genetics in Los Angeles have already achieved parthenogenesis in mice. They have taken mouse eggs and have induced them to duplicate their own set of chromosomes in order to create the number needed to begin cell division. These unfertilized mouse eggs developed into “parthenotes,” or pseudo embryos with a full complement of mouse chromosomes. The researchers transferred 60 of these parthenotes into the reproductive tracts of mouse “foster mothers.” On the 13th day of gestation, they found that 12 of them had survived and were developmentally normal.
The next step was parthenogenesis of monkey embryos, achieved by Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) of Worcester, Mass., in early 2002. The study team manipulated the early monkey embryos into producing brain cells, heart cells, and other tissues.
Parthenogenesis is achieved by “tricking” the egg chromosomes into dividing by submerging them in a chemical cocktail, a “pseudo-sperm,” that sends the proper signals to the mouse egg.
If this were done to a human egg (and this is already technically possible), the baby that would eventually result would always be female and genetically identical to her own mother.
The Final Lesson. God always forgives, man sometimes forgives, but nature never forgives! God, who created man and woman, can see that we are getting further and further away from His plan for human sexuality. But our God is a jealous God, and whenever man tries to equal Him, there is always a backlash. That’s simply the way He designed the universe. You just don’t mess with Mother Nature unless you want a bloody nose — or far worse.
When will we ever learn this lesson?
As we will see in the final article on assisted reproduction, the ideas engendered by scientists are not only getting wilder, but are being proposed for wholesale application to entire populations.