A rchive Date
[ 07-07-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Medicine ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/goodden.html
Orwellian response to fetal research
Herman Goodden, London Free Press
2003-07-07
From the increasingly creepy frontiers of reproductive science came two reports last week from a Madrid confab of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology.
One group of Chicago scientists has made human embryos that are part male and part female. Supposedly, these artificially assembled hermaphrodites in bud will assist our understanding of embryonic development and provide information to help develop new therapies for congenital diseases.
Another report was on researchers in the Netherlands and Israel who have removed immature ovaries from four-month old fetuses they hope to stimulate through further stages of growth in test tubes until they can extract mature eggs to use in the creation of new human life.
Those fetuses are what we in the pro-life camp call "unborn babies." If scientists push this project along to its grisly fruition, those same fetuses will have to be reclassified as "unborn mothers."
It is stunts such as these that make us question the motives of people in white lab coats. What gives them the moral authority to go mucking about in a realm that most of us (and not just those who are religiously inclined) instinctively regard as sacred?
Many folks would describe such indifference toward what should be the inviolable dignity of human origins as "Orwellian." In what remains his most celebrated novel, Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell (1903-50) described life in a dictatorial society where every human instinct of love or compassion was mercilessly suppressed and put down.
But like Marshall McLuhan is commonly misperceived as celebrating a media-drenched culture that, in fact, he abhorred, so Orwell is often regarded by those who haven't read him as some sort of cross between Machiavelli and Stephen King - a writer who took perverse delight in imagining tyrannical states.
Nineteen Eighty Four was Orwell's last and least typical book, and should also be construed as a kind of warning. In the humourless extremism of the dystopia he depicted, it was unlike anything he'd written before. In this centennial of his birth, a flood of new books is appearing that celebrates Orwell's sturdy independence of thought, his unfailing common touch and the over-riding sense of decency that permeate all his books and essays.
Regarded as a marginal writer nearly all of his career, today he stands as one of the untainted giants of 20th-century letters. George Woodcock called his 1966 study of Orwell, The Crystal Spirit. Judging by the principles laid down in his writing, I expect Orwell would be railing against the kind of obscenities being disclosed last week in Madrid.
Consider his 1936 novel, Keep The Aspidistra Flying, faithfully filmed in 1998 as A Merry War. Gordon Comstock is a failed poet with a rotten attitude, working as a clerk in a mouldy used bookshop and cranking out essays of socialist criticism for a Marxist rag called The Antichrist, when his on-again, off-again girlfriend announces she's nine weeks' pregnant and will get an abortion, as she knows he won't support her.
Rosemary's pregnancy turns out to be the "growup" call. He instantly realizes, "that it was a dreadful thing they were contemplating - a blasphemy, if that word had any meaning."
Comstock ducks into a library to peruse a picture book on fetal development. "He came upon a print of a nine weeks' fetus. It was a deformed, gnomelike thing, a sort of clumsy caricature of a human being, with a huge domed head as big as the rest of its body . . . It was a monstrous thing, and yet strangely human. It surprised him that they should begin looking human so soon. He had pictured something much more rudimentary; a mere blob of nucleus, like a bubble of frog-spawn."
One suspects disposable frog-spawn is what scientists think they're dealing with in Madrid.
Herman Goodden is a London freelance writer. His column appears in Monday's and Thursday's Opinion pages. It no longer appears in Sunday's A&E section. He can be e-mailed at herman.goodden@sympatico.ca Copyright © The London Free Press 2001,2002,2003
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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