Culture Friday: Engineering out suffering

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 22nd of August.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s Culture Friday and John Stonestreet joins us. He’s president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint Podcast. Good morning, John!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: Well John, I want to start with a story. I read a really pointed, powerful opinion piece that sent me looking to find out more about this tech entrepreneur it was criticizing.

The young lady’s name is Noor Siddiqui. She’s founder of a biotech startup called Orchid.

She’s got a personal story that explains why she started her company, let’s listen:

SIDDIQUI: My mom has this condition called retinitis pigmentosa. So what that means is that she started progressively going blind in her 30s. Just because of a typo, a random letter change that she, you know, when she was being formed, she ended up having just totally changed the trajectory of her life. And it wasn't her parents’ faults, but just spontaneously, randomly, like, just sheer horrible luck happened to her. And I think that just struck me as like, this is a huge unfairness.

In school at Stanford, Siddiqui realized that genetic science and big data were colliding—and that in the future parents might one day be able to avoid what she terms “random suffering.” In other words, avoid the blindness that afflicts her mother.

SIDDIQUI: Now, it could be possible for us to use data at the earliest possible stage, before you're even pregnant, so that you can identify an embryo that is free of these pathogenic or disease causing mutations so that a baby has the maximum chance of being healthy.

EICHER: And she’s not shy about where she thinks all this is headed.

SIDDIQUI: Yeah, I think maybe one of my spicier opinions is that I think that embryo screening is actually going to be the default way everyone has kids. I think that sex is going to be for, you know, connection and for fun with your partner, and for something really important, like having kids, everyone is going to choose to do embryo screening.

So there you go. That’s the vision.

In the opinion column I mentioned, writer Seth Troutt lays out a clearly plausible scenario. So imagine a couple using IVF and the services of Orchid. All the genetics are mapped for all the embryos. The predictions made. Quoting now from the column:

“This one has a chance of developing bipolar? This one has Downs Syndrome? This one will need hearing aids? This one will need insulin injections? Pass. Discard.”

He goes on: Here’s the irony in this: Noor would not exist if the technology and plausibility structures she’s promoting existed before her mother was conceived. Her mother would have been [one of the discards].”

So now that you have the vision and the critique—that this is eugenics in high-tech packaging—what do you think should be done … how do you think this through?

STONESTREET: Well, you have to think it through historically, because, honestly, this is a necessary consequence of a whole lot of, to use the phrase here, plausibility structures that have been in place for a long time. So you have this, what G. K. Chesterton might have called a triangle of truism—sex, marriage, and babies—and we’re separating these things, and the final stage of that is the one that we’re in right now. We separated sex from babies and sex from marriage, and marriage from babies and babies from marriage. And now we’re separating baby making from sex.

In fact, that’s what the founder of this company so clearly has said. In fact, she said it even more succinctly than she did in the clip we played earlier, where she says, “Sex is for pleasure. IVF is for babies.”

Now, one of the things I want to point out is that the discarding of babies based on certain conditions—this company is not offering anything new. They’re just offering the same thing in a far more holistic and efficient, and they’re promising a higher rate of success. Do we all remember just a few years ago when the nation of Iceland announced that it had eradicated Down syndrome? It had not eradicated Down syndrome; it eradicated all the children with Down syndrome in utero. In IVF, this kind of screening already happens. In her podcast with Ross Douthat she just clarifies she’s just doing it better because of the technology of being able to screen the entire genome and to use AI in order to do these calculations in a much more fast and efficient sort of way. This is what she is promising.

But make no mistake, we’ve already embraced this technology. Millions of Christians have already embraced IVF as it’s currently practiced. All she’s doing is two additional things. Number one, she’s offering a more efficient way to do this screening with more categories screened. And number two, she’s suggesting that it should apply to everyone, not just those who are trying to do a workaround to infertility in order to achieve a child. That all children should be made this way.

This is the natural and logical consequence of what has already been put in place. When it comes to artificial reproductive technologies, there is nothing different here except better technology. That’s what everyone needs to understand. It’s already been made commercial. It’s already treated an embryo as if it’s a commodity. It’s already treated an embryo as if it is disposable. It’s already separated the sacred act of sexuality from the child, and that’s a part of it no ethicist that I know has even really weighed in on. But Ross Douthat did ask this question in his interview: what will be lost if children now come into the world not out of an act of love, but out of an act of manufacturing?

He didn’t quite say it that way, but that’s the question. What will be lost for the kids? What will be lost in terms of the sacredness of the sexual act? But this is just the train going down further, the same tracks that have already been laid.

EICHER: Do you recall, John, what the answer was? What did she say to that question? That’s a great question.

STONESTREET: Oh, I mean, it’s the same stumble. It’s basically, “Don’t impose your religious values on me,” which was essentially, no one has to do this—even though she argues everyone should do this, because why would you subject your kid to unnatural suffering? And it is fascinating that, by her own reasoning, her own mother, which motivated this whole process, would have been, quote, unquote, discarded.

But don’t miss this part of the story. The same week that Douthat interviewed the Orchid founder—and that’s what sent my spidey sense tingling—there was an article that was published talking about the doctor in China who had created embryos and used CRISPR, the gene-editing technology. Do you remember this story from a couple years ago? He was put in prison. I think it was a show just from China, but it didn’t actually stop things. Well, this guy now is out of prison, now lives in Austin, Texas. He married a woman, and they got divorced. She’s just as interested in it as he is, and now they have started competing companies to mainstream CRISPR technology in terms of gene editing.

So let’s do the math, kids. You have the ability to screen embryos, add in the technology of being able to genetically edit these same embryos, and now children are absolutely being made in a lab and not out of the act of love.

BROWN: In Britain, a 65-year-old woman named Amanda Bloom — a crafting influencer with a big following online — recently traveled to Switzerland to end her life at a clinic called Pegasos. She wasn’t sick. She said she couldn’t live with the grief of losing her only daughter to cancer several years ago. In a farewell video she posted to Instagram from inside the clinic, she said, “By the time you see this, I’ll be with my Jenny.”

She’s not the only one. Pegasos has also ended the lives of other people who were grieving but otherwise healthy, sometimes without even telling their families until after the fact.

We don’t grieve as the world does. John, this is an example of why we as believers don’t grieve as those without hope.

STONESTREET: It is—I just want to remind everyone of a quote that should haunt our days, probably until at least for the rest of our lifetimes, from Stanley Hauerwas: that if Christians in 100 years are known as those who did not kill their elderly and did not kill their young, we will have done well.

This story is a story about grieving as without hope, and then what that looks like when it’s actually enabled by technology and it’s encouraged by state forces. And when that becomes possible, it becomes thinkable. And when it becomes thinkable, then it just takes little nudges here and there. And the story out of Switzerland is an incredible example, right? Because what does it mean, for example, to justify doctor-assisted death on a hopeless diagnosis? But suddenly, in the middle of the game, the language changes, and then it’s like, well, no, this is not a terminal condition, but it’s a hopeless condition. It’s a condition from which the person will never heal. Well, that includes almost all of us. I mean, all of us have some sort of thing that we’ll have to live with for the rest of our lives.

But then what’s that line between that and what allows someone to kill themselves? Well, it has to do with unbearable suffering. Some people can bear up under all kinds of suffering. I think of Joni Eareckson Tada, for example. Some people are hypochondriacs and can’t deal with anything. And then—but are we just talking about physical suffering? Are we talking about emotional suffering?

I mean, I watched this happen in Colorado, where the whole thing was sold on alleviation of physical suffering, and then I saw the stats from Oregon, which had had doctor-assisted suicide at the time for 20 years, and all the reasons they gave were emotional suffering, especially the “I don’t want to be a burden.” And that’s why I appreciate so much Gilbert Meilaender’s piece years ago, “I Want to Be a Burden,” because that’s the sort of thing you should be able to rely on your family about, and that’s the sort of love we should be able to give each other.

And here you have someone who’s struggling with a deep set of grief. There’s nothing physical at all, and then all of a sudden, it should be left up to the individual. Well, but what about an individual that can’t give consent? And what about consent for minors? Like, we haven’t even figured out whether minors can consent to sex or not, or mutilating surgery. Are we talking about minors being able, then, to consent to death? And then what if they can’t? Can someone consent on their behalf?

And I think that this story is only outpaced by the stories we’re seeing out of Canada, just because Medical Assistance in Dying only got legalized like yesterday, and now you see this right to die become the pressure to die and the duty to die. And then you have financial incentives being worked in where, you know, oh yes, the state health care will pay for these medications that’ll kill you, but they will not pay for these medications that will treat your pain.

These sorts of ethical problems are unavoidable if you do not keep straight the doctor’s profession. This is not the doctor’s profession, but it’s what the doctor’s profession is being made to be.

EICHER: Sobering. John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast, thanks, John.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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