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Have you ever heard of Gattaca? It's a sci-fi movie that revolves around reproductive technologies, in order to create "perfect" children. It explores a possible future that would allow parents to decide what sex their child will be, the colour of their eyes, make them immune to illness, etc... Now, I'm sure some of you are already aware that this is already possible to do to some extent in special clinics, but what concerned me when I watched this film in philosophy class is the fact that in future there would be a possibility for parents to tick the box "heterosexual" and "cis-gendered" on a sheet of paper and there it would be, the end of all people whose gender and or sexual orientation didn't fit into what society considers as normal and acceptable. It worried me, children would no longer be conceived out of love and loved for who they are but would be made through a laboratory and wouldn't be loved for who they are, but for who they're made to be.
Well guess what. Gattaca has come, and I've finally lost faith in humanity because lets face it, what they're doing isn't human. They're confronting and replacing mother nature, if nature does something it's because it usually has its reason to do so, but no; Man knows best of course and this is why... Doctors are using a synthetic off-label drug - a drug that hasn't been approved by the Food and Drug Administration - to prevent lesbian, bisexual, intersex and tomboy babies! Yes that's right you read it correctly.
A recent paper published in Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, by Alice Dreger details a dangerous fetal engineering process, in which doctors are using a synthetic steroid to prevent female babies being born with with the condition congenital adrenal hyperplasia - genetic disease involving the malfunction of adrenal glands and endocrine organs that contribute to the production of sex steroids - which means a higher risk of females being born as intersex or with masculine behaviour.
*This intervention has been aimed at preventing development of ambiguous genitalia, the urogenital sinus, tomboyism, and lesbianism.
Pregnant women who are at risk of giving birth to a child with the congenital adrenal hyperplasia condition are given a synthetic steroid drug: dexamethasone, in order to "normalise" the fetuses; in other words to make their brains more female-typical than they might be without the treatment.
Prenatal dexamethasone is meant to engineer the CAH-affected female fetus’s hormonal system to be typically female.
However the drug has to be given before one can tell if the fetus is female or male and so, in the end only 1 out 8 fetuses are the targeted fetus.
What is even more disturbing is that some parents are OK with this, there are parents who are willing to risk their child's life and health just to make sure they aren't queer! Tell me parents, is having a gay or tomboy child so bad that you're willing to risk your unborn baby's life and health just to make sure they aren't born that way? Because for lack of quality studies, there isn't even any solid proof that this drug works:
For lack of quality clinical studies, the 2010 Task Force could not even say with any confidence whether prenatal dexamethasone works to reduce genital virilization.
Yet people still seem happy in risking a child's health, a child who can't have any say in whether they want to be part of such a medical experimentation.
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The problem here is that the doctors are openly admitting that there is something genetic about being gay, and so gay and bisexual people really are Born This Way, but instead of accepting that and agreeing that the QUILTBAG community is normal they are going to try and fix us. You see parents and doctors, you're trying to fix something that isn't broken, and you know how the saying goes...
I don't even think that these doctors have considered the fact that not every female who likes stereotypical male activities is gay, just as not every lesbian or bisexual woman is tomboy.
In more ways than not, this experiment seems to be a way of eliminating parents anxieties, and thus this treatment isn't really meant to benefit the child, to make their life "better" or "easier", but rather the parents. I don't know if one can justify experimenting on a fetus to reduce a parent's anxiety especially when there are many risks to be taken into account...
Such experimentations can lead to abnormalities that can go on for several generations, high risk of certain cancers, and also a higher risk of gender dysphoria has been found in male fetuses who were exposed to the drug, to name a few of the side-effects.
This seems all too familiar in a way, do any of you remember what the Nazis did during the Second World War? They experimented on humans, and most of these people were young Jewish children.
Nazism and these experiments ended when the Second World War was over, and everyone condemned the Nazis for doing such horrible things, yet here we are today in Western Society doing it all again, experimenting on children, unborn children. How messed up is the world?
To finish, I think that these Doctors, who instead of making peoples' lives better by finding cures to diseases are actually increasing the risk of cancers and other illnesses by playing the role of mother nature, should read the Geneva convention which prohibits such experiments.
Medical experiments: In prohibiting medical experiments on protected persons, the Diplomatic Conference wished to abolish for ever the criminal practices from which thousands of persons suffered in the death camps of the last world war.
The Convention, however, refers only to "medical or scientific experiments not necessitated by the medical treatment of a protected person". It does not, therefore, prevent doctors using new forms of treatment for medical reasons with the sole object of improving the patient's condition. It must be permissible to use new medicaments and methods invented by science, provided that they are used only for therapeutic purposes. Protected persons must not in any circumstances be used as "guinea-pigs" for medical experiments.
"Biological experiments" are also prohibited by the other three Conventions of 1949 and they are listed among the "grave breaches" in Article 147.
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It doesn't take a genius to understand that this sort of thinking and experimentation can only lead to some serious damage in the long, if not short run. Who has the right to say and decide who you're born as? No one. It seems that this sort of experiment is going against what people tell every child as they grow up: just be yourself.
*All quotes but the last one are from the full report paper Journal of Bioethical Inquiry by Alice Dreger which can be found here.
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