The Danger of the Cure: The Role of the "Three-Parent Baby" Model in the Catholic Tradition's Understanding of the Common Good
Deirdre Cooney, BS, Student, Kings College
The institution of medicine has in its recent history steered away from its altruistic roots in favor of becoming an increasingly profit-driven industry. In straying from these roots, medicine has become an industrial process that increasingly tends to give patients the resources they desire to transcend the limits of human being. The proliferation of this for-profit enterprise has transformed healthcare into a multi-billion dollar industry that enriches corporations and produces consumer goods at the expense of caring, in any comprehensive sense, for the sick. The industrialization of medicine is particularly evident in the rapid expansion of assisted reproductive technologies. ARTs have become so intertwined with diagnostic and therapeutic procedures that they have come to play a significant role in normative accounts of human health. The latest manifestation of this role aims to prevent the transmission of so-called mitochondrial disease. Scientists have developed a model of in vitro fertilization where the disease-linked mitochondrial DNA of the prospective birth mother is replaced with healthy mitochondrial DNA from the ovum of a donor before in vitro fertilization. The resulting child would have the mitochondrial DNA of the donor mother, the nuclear DNA of the birth mother, and the complete genome of the birth father The preventative technology, nicknamed by some in the media as the “three-parent baby model,” has raised a host of questions by critics from a wide range of moral traditions. Perhaps the most significant question posed has to do with whether and how this and similar technologies contribute or not to what the Catholic tradition calls the common good of society. This paper will examine the role that technologies such as the “three-parent baby” model play in how we as a society view the role of children – namely, whether the addition of the “three-parent baby” model to the already expansive array of ARTs contributes to the commodification of human life in ways that abandon the common good in favor of expanding consumerism into the realm of child bearing.
The institution of medicine has in its recent history steered away from its altruistic roots in favor of becoming an increasingly profit-driven industry. In straying from these roots, medicine has become an industrial process that increasingly tends to give patients the resources they desire to transcend the limits of human being. The proliferation of this for-profit enterprise has transformed healthcare into a multi-billion dollar industry that enriches corporations and produces consumer goods at the expense of caring, in any comprehensive sense, for the sick. The industrialization of medicine is particularly evident in the rapid expansion of assisted reproductive technologies. ARTs have become so intertwined with diagnostic and therapeutic procedures that they have come to play a significant role in normative accounts of human health. The latest manifestation of this role aims to prevent the transmission of so-called mitochondrial disease. Scientists have developed a model of in vitro fertilization where the disease-linked mitochondrial DNA of the prospective birth mother is replaced with healthy mitochondrial DNA from the ovum of a donor before in vitro fertilization. The resulting child would have the mitochondrial DNA of the donor mother, the nuclear DNA of the birth mother, and the complete genome of the birth father The preventative technology, nicknamed by some in the media as the “three-parent baby model,” has raised a host of questions by critics from a wide range of moral traditions. Perhaps the most significant question posed has to do with whether and how this and similar technologies contribute or not to what the Catholic tradition calls the common good of society. This paper will examine the role that technologies such as the “three-parent baby” model play in how we as a society view the role of children – namely, whether the addition of the “three-parent baby” model to the already expansive array of ARTs contributes to the commodification of human life in ways that abandon the common good in favor of expanding consumerism into the realm of child bearing.