Playing God

I really should be studying right now, but this post does have some relation to my schoolwork, so I deem it a necessary form of procrastination, lest I lose any of my current inspiration.

As third-year nursing students, we are required to take a class entitled Ethical-Legal Dimensions of Nursing. Part of our course requirements, as outlined by our professor, is a presentation of a "current event" or some sort of ethical dilemma that plagues healthcare today. Each of us pick a week and present on our various topics and this week, the debate became heated in a very kind way. One of the topics that was presented involved genetic testing of embryos that allowed scientists and doctors to "block" certain genes that were associated with congenital disorders and diseases. Basically, that means that if they found your baby had something, they would go in there and block that part of the DNA so that when the baby was born, it would be a "normal" newborn.

We were, of course, asked our opinion. And I told this story:

In 1992, before I was born, when the doctors were performing an ultrasound on my mother, they found that I had some defect in my brain (it could've been a cyst, or abnormal growth, who knows). The doctor looked at my mother and told her that there was a change I could be born with Down Syndrome,  and told her that it would be her decision, but abortion was an option. My mother said that regardless of the outcome, she really wanted to have this child and so the pregnancy proceeded and I was born.

And there was not a sign of Down Syndrome in sight.
I am twenty-years-old, a nursing student, winner of an academic scholarship, working two jobs, awarded a scholarship by a large corporation, Novo Nordisk, for my intent to do research regarding diabetes and the only real medical issues that plagued me growing up were a case of childhood asthma and eczema. I had no congenital defects and yet, my parents were still given the option to abort and that frightens me. Because what if knowledge of false-positives wasn't available to my mother? Or what if they lived in an area where the technology was not up to scratch with the medicine of that time period?

But what really gets me isn't the genetic testing at all. I'm all for leaps and bounds in medicine. If you're able to get your DNA mapped and find that you're at risk for having babies with x, y, and z and choose not to have children, that's one thing. Genetically engineering your baby is another thing because once you can block one part of a DNA sequence... who's to say you can't block the brown-eyes or the blonde hair or even the pasty-white skin?

Out of all the advances in medicine, genetic testing gives me the biggest heebie-jeebies. Playing God isn't like playing house. Once you've changed someone's DNA, you've changed their projected life and then the whole "everything happens for a reason" is gone because you can take every negative aspect out of the equation.

I just don't believe that humanity will continue to flourish if we eradicate the very issues that challenge us to grow, learn and cure the afflicted.

Everything happens for a reason.
And there are times when I'd rather not know why.