The next prolife battle

Over 100,000 people marched in Washington Tuesday in the annual remembrance of the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Two of the participants were Elizabeth Prizzi and her 17-month-old son Luke, who is alive because Prizzi did not obey the new abortionist call for "compassion."

According to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, doctors recommended to Prizzi that "she abort the baby she'd been carrying for 18 weeks. It was for the best, they said. A sonogram showed her son suffered from gastrocesis, a condition in which intestines form outside the body." Prizzi said no to abortion, and this story has a happy ending: A later sonogram revealed that Luke was fine.

The Prizzi story is one of many. Many bioethicists argue that abortion of babies who may be genetically defective is an act of love. Not genetically testing unborn babies seems irresponsible. And, as we move toward the ability to improve unborn babies through genetic therapy, the pressure will be on to require genetic testing and even genetic enhancements.

The next step will be "designer babies" - and that will be hard to resist. Even those who want God to be in charge, rather than parents or governments playing god, will be hit with statements that God created creative people, so frowning on their innovations is disparaging God's providence. As Ronald Dworkin writes in his book Sovereign Virtue, "The principle of bodily integrity may… be one of those artifacts of conventional morality that seemed well justified before the possibilities suggested by modern genetic medicine were plausibly imagined, but not after."

Now that human nature has defeated the plans of numerous social engineers, the goal of those seeking radical liberation will increasingly be the transformation of human nature through the creation of super-humans. But Christians say our basic problem is that we're fallen humans living in a fallen world: Our sense of displacement points to the truth that our real home is elsewhere. Genetic engineering can't eliminate fallenness.

Besides, that dark cloud has a silver lining, as novelist Walker Percy understood: "Knowing why we are not fully at home, we are free to experience the good things of the world for what they are."