Category Archives: Human Reproduction

WASHINGTON The Center for Biological Diversity filed a formal notice today of its intent to sue the Environmental Protection Agency for failing to assess harms to endangered species before nearly tripling the levels of dangerous cadmium pollution that are allowed in U.S. waters.

The heavy metal, which bioaccumulates at all levels of the food chain, is toxic to plants and animals, including people at very low levels.

In 2016 the EPA approved a 188% increase in the allowable chronic freshwater exposure to the heavy metal, despite warnings from the National Marine Fisheries Service that it would potentially be harmful to endangered species.

Cadmium is extremely toxic, so it makes no sense to weaken the safeguards against it, said Ashley Bruner, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. This was a poisonous mistake that needs to be corrected right away by President-elect Biden. Itll help prevent the extinction of endangered species like sea turtles, sturgeon and freshwater mussels.

Elevated levels of cadmium have been identified in all three of those aquatic animals. Cadmium can cause a range of harms, affecting growth, reproduction, immune and endocrine systems, development and behavior. Its also highly toxic to fish: It disrupts the endocrine functions of Atlantic salmon and those of protected salmonids in the Pacific Northwest, which, in turn, reduces prey species for protected Southern Resident killer whales.

The EPAs habit of ignoring the risks that toxic pollution in our environment pose to endangered species is helping to drive some seriously imperiled animals closer to extinction, said Bruner. The agency has left us with no choice but to launch this lawsuit to protect vulnerable wildlife from this dangerous heavy metal.

Cadmium pollution is widespread in both fresh and marine waters. Human activities are the source of more than 90% of the total cadmium found in surface waters. The combustion of fossil fuels like coal contributes approximately 40% of the pollution, while between 33% and 56% of the pollution is released by phosphate fertilizers.

The EPA is required to set water-quality criteria under the Clean Water Act, which set benchmarks for states to follow when they develop water-quality standards.

Since the EPA updated its cadmium criteria in 2016, 18 states, territories and tribes have both started to develop and proposed, updated water-quality standards for cadmium for approval by the EPA. In every case the states used the EPAs water-quality criteria, and the EPA approved them without changes.

Originally posted here:
Lawsuit Launched Against EPA to Protect Endangered Aquatic Species From Cadmium Pollution - Center for Biological Diversity

December 14, 2020

Editor's note:This story is part of a series of profiles ofnotable fall 2020 graduates.

Before attending the Thunderbird School of Global Management at ASU, Makenna Flynn had already started developing a global mindset and empathy skills through her work at a local refugee resettlement office. Thunderbird graduate Makenna Flynn plans to pursue her masters in management in the schools 4+1 program. Photo by Charlie Leight/ASU Now Download Full Image

She expanded her worldview by listening to the stories of struggle, triumph and tragedy shared there by refugees and employees. Flynn learned about the adversity that caused them to flee their home countries, places such as Iraq, Myanmar, Afghanistan, El Salvador and Somalia where poverty and violence have turned many citizens into refugees in recent years.

When Flynn relayed to her adviser at Paradise Valley Community College how she felt hearing these stories, he suggested a Thunderbird at ASU program. Flynn did some research on the school and says she immediately felt connected. She chose ASU with the goal of earning a Thunderbird masters degree after completing her undergraduate studies.

As a first-generation college student, Flynn was elated with the expanded learning opportunities outside the classroom. She spent a month in Argentina immersing herself in the culture and gathering more stories from residents. She saw the impact of globalization on a traditional culture, allowing her to contextualize what she was learning in the classroom and deepening her understanding of the dynamics of the global economy.

Flynn is a recipient of an ASU Young Alumni Scholarship, APS Scholarship and a Lentz Scholarship. She will continue her studies at ASU after graduation to earn her Master of Global Management in one year instead of two through Thunderbirds 4+1 program.

She hopes to work in storytelling marketing in a social enterprise or business that makes a positive impact in its communities. Flynn will continue to collect and share stories about people from all over the world, narratives that she believes create the new human connections needed to build inclusive, sustainable prosperity in international communities through global cooperation.

Question: What was your aha moment, when you realized you wanted to study the field you majored in?

Answer: In high school, I participated in a leadership program called the Hugh OBrian World Leadership Congress (WLC). During this weeklong congress, one of the days was spent learning about major global issues. I heard professors speak about the right to an education and learned more about the global refugee crisis. After the mini courses, I felt the need to educate myself further and find out how to make a positive difference. And the more I researched, the more I realized the opportunities available for businesses to be that difference in the world.

Q: Whats something you learned while at ASU in the classroom or otherwise that surprised you or changed your perspective?

A: I have learned the importance of knowing how to manage stress. For a while, I would overload myself with extra coursework, part-time jobs and extracurricular activities without ever really taking time for myself. This past year, I have spent more time doing the activities that I love like hiking, exploring Arizona with friends, playing basketball or holding a movie night with my family. Setting aside this time to recharge has allowed me to focus more fully on my academics and professional development than before.

Q: Which professor taught you the most important lesson while at ASU?

A: My communications professor, Professor Kenneth Kunkel, taught me the importance of not tying my sense of self-worth to my grades. When I entered his class, I would be so focused on trying to get the A that I would often miss out on the creative side of public speaking. It wasnt until my advanced public speaking class where I realized my strength as a speaker lies in creating unique content, not simply following the rubric and adding no personal material.

Q: Whats the best piece of advice youd give to those still in school?

A: Explore various interests, especially in your undergraduate degree. While my major was global management, I spent my electives exploring world philosophies, developing my public speaking skills, learning about astrology and other hobbies of mine. This interdisciplinary education gave me a much richer perspective in my core business coursework.

Q: What was your favorite spot on campus, whether for studying, meeting friends or just thinking about life?

A: My favorite spot to study is at the West campus on the grassy area outside of the Casa de Oro residential hall. I love to roll out a blanket, turn some music on and spend the afternoon studying and hanging out with friends.

Q: If someone gave you $40 million to solve one problem on our planet, what would you tackle?

A: I would invest $40 million into producing alternatives to unsustainable development. Dams, mines and tourist attractions (among other industries) often displace Indigenous communities and negatively impact the environment. Finding more sustainable solutions will have positive impacts across sectors and for most stakeholders.

Written by Joanna Furst

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How and why microbes promote and protect against stress - ASU Now

As the hope and promise of winter rain grows, I look forward to the season of mushroom hunting. While the semi-arid climate of southern California isnt as famous for mushroom hunting as the lush rainforests of the Pacific Northwest or the rainy redwoods of Northern California, there are still plenty of fungal treasures to discover in the oak woodlands and coastal sage scrub of the front range once rain arrivesif you practice a keen eye and patience.

Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of underground mycelial webs which knit the world together. They are the visible, often delicious aboveground manifestation of subterranean fungal networks comprised of threadlike, hollow tubes called hyphae. Mushrooms emerge briefly, triggered by rain and humidity, to cast fungal spore into the wind for reproduction. Even after mushrooms release their spore to the wind and disappear the fungal webs from which they came persist for generations, sending up new fruiting bodies every rainy season.

Despite their reliance on humid climates, fungi thrive throughout the world from the Arctic Circle to the Mojave Desert. In fact, fungal networks are a critical component to the soil ecology of arid landscapes, including those of inland California. Fungi are long-lived and can grow to enormous proportions. The largest known organism on Earth is a honey mushroom in Oregon whose mycelial web underpins almost 2400 acres of the Malheur National Forest.

Fungi are essential to life on Earth. They are primary decomposers of decaying matter, recycling spent, dead and dying material into organic, fertile soil capable of growing carbon-storing forests, lush river valleys and rich fields for human agriculture. Because of their ability to break things down, fungi play a central role in the growing science of bioremediation, as humans begin to confront and repair ecosystems damaged with plastic litter, agricultural poisons, nuclear waste and chemical and oil spills. Fungi show incredible promise in returning these intractable-seeming waste streams into harmless environmental elements. Amazingly, in one recent experiment scientists grew oyster mushrooms out of plastic waste in just a few short months, reducing waste volume by 80% while producing edible oyster mushrooms.

Fungi are one of the most mysterious kingdoms of life on Earth. Scientists estimate that at least 90% of fungus species remain unknown and undocumented, despite their everyday importance in our lives. One of the most interesting developments in mycology (another word for fungus) research is that of mapping communication networks spanning the underground webs of fungal organisms and trees and plants within forest communities.

Recent research reveals that fungi are constantly communicating via electrical and chemical signals, and that different branches of the same fungal network spread over a vast space are capable of sharing nutrients with depleted areas of the network. Fungi also seem to facilitate a similar sharing of resources within separate, distinct trees and plants in old-growth forest communities. For example, scientists have shown through peer-reviewed field experiments that forest trees warn one another of insect pests, herbivore predations and toxic shifts in the physical environment, allowing surrounding trees to mount chemical defenses. In addition, mature trees dying of old age will share their remaining nutrient stores with younger, smaller trees nearby before their demise. Scientists speculate that much of this communication and chemical sharing is enabled by the fungal networks that span healthy, diverse forests, connecting trees to one another.

This research is groundbreaking because it calls into question one of the basic premises of evolutionary biology: survival of the fittest or the belief that life on Earth is a constant battle for limited resources. While the critical science of this work is still emergent, early conclusions drawn from decades of fieldwork provide a hopeful and helpful alternative moral compass for our human community as well, predicated on communication, resource-sharing and cooperation for the betterment of the whole.

This work underlines how little we still understand about the complexity and interdependence of old-growth habitats.

Much of the recent work on mycelial webs within forests was triggered by foresters who realized that the replanting of logged forests with a single species of trees wasnt working. Despite extra water and care, young trees were unable to survive in clear cut landscapes. Current scientific thought points to the fact that logged landscapes often cause the erosion and degradation of the recently-exposed soil surface, which damages or kills the fungal network partly responsible for feeding and nurturing young trees, to the detriment of replanted monocultures.

I wrote an article this September on the Forest Services proposal to log old growth pine forests in our backcountry backyard along the Pine Mountain ridgeline. Perhaps sciences growing recognition of the interconnection and interdependence of seemingly disparate wild lives is another caution against such a proposal.

Alena Steen is coordinator of the Carpinteria Garden Park, an organic community garden located at 4855 5th St., developed by the citys Parks and Recreation Department.Community members rent a plot to grow their own fresh produce. For more information, visit carpinteria.ca.us/parks-and-recreation or contact Alena at alenas@ci.carpinteria.ca.us.

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The world of mushrooms | Opinion | coastalview.com - Coastal View News

Authors and former io9 majordomos Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders have a fortnightly podcast called Our Opinions Are Correct, which covers all sorts of nerd culture and science-related topics. In the December 3 episode, "Birth Control of the Future," Newitz and Anders discuss reproductive and contraceptive technologies, both real and imagined, and the various ramifications they might have on society.

There's a lot of interesting ground here, from artificial wombs to morning after pill vending machines to the impact of coronavirus (and potentially other pandemics) on child-rearing responsibilities. Also the fact that human penises are curiously not designed for aggression, unlike many other mammal phalluses. But Newitz and Anders offer two observations over the course of the 45-minute podcast that really stood out for me.

First, in terms of language. For the sake of both clarity and simplicity, the hosts deliberately refer to "People with Eggs" and "People with Sperm," rather than by sex or gender. Because sex and gender are complicated; basic reproductive requirements, less so. "Male/female" and "man/woman" have always been frustratingly opaque termsnot just because the words have such a binary dependent relationship with each other, but also, because of how we define them. Despite what some people think, "biological sex" (for lack of a better term) has been determined solely by an X or Y chromosome; that's true for humans as well as other animals. Hell, humans are as likely to be intersex as they are to have red hairit's a minority, sure, but it's something most of still encounter on a fairly regular basis (when not in quarantine). When you're specifically talking about people in terms of reproductive functioningand you need a shorthand, catch-all way to broadly refer to them"People with Eggs" and "People with Sperm" is inclusive, and efficient.

I was also struck by this notiondiscussed throughout the podcastthat while technological advancements in birth control can shape the future of our societies, it's just as important to change the ways that we currently view and think about sex and reproduction. Our perceptions are inherently limited by our pre-existing assumptions about these things, and that frames how we approach issues like healthcare (read: abortion). It made me think about an article I wrote in 2016 about a male birth control pill study that was cancelled, sending the internet into a furor. The details that got picked up (and mocked) in the headlines were the fact that the study was cancelled, and that some of the men involved had reported PMS-like symptoms. The joke, as it were, was that this was a clear case of masculinity-so-fragilethat these people with sperm couldn't handle something that people with eggs dealt with on a regular basis.

While I certainly understood the Schadenfreudic satisfaction there, the problem was: it wasn't true. The study was cancelled was because it was a shit study that neglected to control for things like diet, culture, and pre-existing mental health conditions. And of the few hundred people involved in the study, some were permanently sterilized, some of them died by suicide, and some of them tried to die by suicide. It reached a point where there was simply nothing else that be gained, learned, or achieved by continuing a study that also risked harming people.

Where it gets even messier, however, is the fact that the invention of birth control for people with eggs was just asif not moreinhumane than that 2016 birth control study for people with sperm.

Theshort versionof the story: Puerto Rican women and asylum inmates were forced to participate in early trials for female birth control pills in1955. In fact, in Puerto Rico, where contraception and abortion were legal and available butforced sterilizationwas also occurring, the researchers specifically sought out the "ovulating intelligent" in medical school, where the trials became a required part of their curriculum. If they dropped out or refused to participate, they'd be expelled from school.

Later, when the drug was tested underslightlymore humane circumstances,there were still some big problems:The researchersenticed womenwith the "no pregnancy" part while conveniently leaving out the details about the potential side effects of the pills.If the recent male trial that got everyone up in arms was bad by modern standards (which it was), then these adverse effects weremonstrous:17% of participants had serious complaints, three people may or may not havediedas a result, and one of the researchers even straight up admitted that there were "too many side reactions to be generally acceptable."

This, I think, represents a good microcosm about why our pre-existing assumptions about reproductive and contraception cloud the way that we approach them in the future. First, there's how we actually conduct our studies. As I wrote in 2016:

TheFood and Drug Administrationrequires20,000 menstrual cycles' worth of safety data for women.But since men don't cycle, no one has determined how long men's birth control would need to be tested to be deemed safe.

Coupled with the difficulty of establishingplacebo controlsfor contraceptives (giving someone a sugar pill and telling them it's fine to have unprotected sex isgenerallyfrowned upon), the potential rewards of thisparticularstudy were really, really unreliable.

In other words: our current regulatory framing of "birth control pills" is inherently gendered, in a way that does not translate to people with sperm. In order to create a birth control pill for those people, we need to completely eradicate and reconstruct that framework. We can't use the past to build a better future.

There's also the fact that the OG birth control pill for people with eggs was a byproduct of violent eugenics that exploited people because of their race, class, and gender. But hey, it all worked out in the end, right? With a largely positive outcome for everyone else who wasn't involved in those trials? Sure. Maybe. But if we're going to use that same oppressive foundation to address birth control for people with sperm, then what are we really gaining by building a "better" future on a pile of corpses?

Anyway. Check out the podcast. You can also checkout the hosts' new books. Annalee Newitz's upcoming nonfiction book, Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age, comes out in February 2021. Charlie Jane Anders released a novel titled The City in the Middle of the Night last year, and has the first book in a new YA series, Victories Greater Than Death, coming in April 2021.

Birth Control Of The Future [Our Opinions Are Correct]

I looked into the backstory of male birth control. Turns out, it's a racist, sexist mess. [Thom Dunn / Upworthy]

Image: Ceridwen/Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 2.0)

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How Birth Control Can Help Us Reimagine The Future - Boing Boing

Although errors in the IVF lab are reportedly few, their consequences may be catastrophic for both patients and clinic. A well attended online Campus meeting in November heard how they may occur and how prevented.

Some errors in the ART lab are more significant than others, a well attended online Campus meeting in November was told. Near misses wont cause harm, whereas implanting the wrong embryo has catastrophic consequences for both patient and clinic.

A comprehensive overview of what can go wrong, why and the consequences was provided by Theofano Bounartzi, deputy of the SIG Ethics & Law, who organised this half day course, and Alessandra Alteri, deputy of the SIG Safety & Quality in ART. However, they left the 170-strong audience in no doubt that humans should not always be blamed for medical mistakes. The fault can lie with the systems behind the procedures, which are relied on with increasing frequency for successful outcomes and satisfied patients.

Nevertheless, the frequency of adverse incidents at fertility centres is low less than 1% of treatment cycles carried out according to the database of the HFEA and are graded from minimal (near miss) to major (eg, embryo mix up). With detailed illustrations, Bounartzi outlined a series of scenarios involving patient misidentification, equipment failure/malfunction, and operator error. Cryostorage failings, she said, caused by lack or misuse of quarantine storage tanks, for example, could lead to cross-contamination of the stored samples, while complications presented by the current coronavirus pandemic might raise additional problems for ART labs.(1) Other errors with serious outcomes would include poor registration data triggering a break in chain-of-custody protocols between clinics.

So the low incidence of errors shouldnt be an excuse for complacency, Alteri warned. Beware the embryologist who says theres never a problem in their lab, she said, while pointing out that its often the conditions that staff work under which need changing, not the individuals themselves. There might be many explanations for a dropped petri dish, for example.

Safety errors can arise from either active failures or latent conditions, as identified by a risk analysis approach - such as the swiss cheese model, the slices representing an organisations barriers against failures and the holes its weaknesses.(1) Active failures are (usually brief) human lapses in judgement, and latent conditions arise from poor strategic decisions. Adverse medical events usually combine latent and active, but system-led problems such as insufficient training or understaffing can be resolved before errors occur. Explained Alteri: So we find good people working in bad systems, and therefore the systems must be made safe.

If a serious adverse event does occur, a gamete mix-up, for example, what are the legal implications? Greek lawyer Theodoros Trokanas analysed prominent cases in common law, concluding that the courts do not regard the birth of a healthy child from an ART error as a compensation for loss or damage. Judges in Singapore, for example, recently awarded costs to parents who wrongly received donor sperm.

1. Perneger T. The Swiss cheese model of safety incidents: are there holes in the metaphor?BMC Health Serv Res 2005; 5: 71. doi.org/10.1186/1472-6963-5-71

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Mishaps and their prevention in the IVF lab - ESHRE

The 1997 science fiction film Gattaca is set in a dystopic future in which the practice of eugenics selective breeding designed to pass on desired genetic traits is the norm.

In this society, couples who want to have children pursue technological reproduction rather than natural procreation. This allows them to pick which of their embryonic children they want to bear after surveying their genomes.

The moral imperative is for parents to conceive and bear the best possible child, not only with preferred physical traits or predispositions for particular talents, but also free from hereditary disease and disability.

To roll the dice and welcome whatever child you get is seen as irresponsible: Not only would you be knowingly disadvantaging your child, you would also be risking reintroducing undesirable genes back into the gene pool.

Sadly, what was science fiction just a few years ago has become a reality.

In the cover story of the December issue of The Atlantic, reporter Sarah Zhang visits Denmark, a country considered moral pioneers in the field of prenatal genetic testing, diagnosis, and decision-making.

In her conversations with families and experts, Zhang uncovers a devastating trend: more than 95% of pregnancies that have a test result showing a likelihood of Trisomy 21, known more commonly as Down syndrome, end in abortion. The phenomenon of selective abortion is gaining traction despite the fact that some results are false positives, and the fact that persons with Trisomy 21 have excellent survival rates and life expectancies.

Persons with Trisomy 21 have varying symptoms (and varying degrees of severity of symptoms), including intellectual disabilities and muscular-skeletal issues. They are more susceptible to heart problems, gastrointestinal abnormalities, and speech issues. Severe cases require significant intervention, therapy, and resources.

Yet others with Down syndrome go to college, find employment, live independently, and get married. Just like any person, their particular challenges and strengths become evident over time, in part due to their genetic makeup as well as the environment in which they develop.

Within hours of the 8,000-word articles publication online, some were praising Zhangs reporting for humanizing and giving a voice to people with Down syndrome. Others, including pro-lifers, expressed outrage: For instance, one writer at The Federalist accused the author of seeking to create sympathy and understanding for eugenics and a modern-day genocide.

But beyond the pieces implications for the pro-life and pro-choice movements, Zhang identifies an uncomfortable, telling paradox one that signals the dawn of what has been called the genetic information age. She writes:

In wealthy countries, it seems to be at once the best and the worst time for Down syndrome. Better health care has more than doubled life expectancy. Better access to education means most children with Down syndrome will learn to read and write. Few people speak publicly about wanting to eliminate Down syndrome. Yet individual choices are adding up to something very close to that.

Put in other words, the article is an invitation for the world to ask itself: How can a society that celebrates diversity, inclusion, and tolerance allow its members who have genetic differences to be systematically, surgically extracted from its population?

During an amniocentesis, a doctor punctures the abdominal wall of a pregnant woman to withdraw the fluid. The fluid is then analyzed for various chromosomal abnormalities. Today, that information can be gleaned from a mothers blood sample by the 10th week of pregnancy. (Shutterstock)

Three overlapping factors have created new moral questions around child-bearing: 1) reproductive technologies, originally designed to assist couples struggling with infertility, have proliferated in type and availability; 2) the project to map the human genome, completed in 2003, has given scientists and doctors a window into the genes of their patients as well as their patients gametes; and 3) prenatal genetic testing has become a routine part of obstetric care.

While originally developed to assist couples who were unable to conceive children through natural procreation, artificial reproductive technologies (ART) now comprise a booming fertility industry. Services like in vitro fertilization are now cheaper, less riskier to women, and more likely to be covered by insurance and thus more widely available.

Because marriage and child-bearing are increasingly delayed in wealthier nations, both infertility and the risk of chromosomal abnormalities are on the rise. This makes in vitro fertilization, now paired with genetic testing, a more desirable method of reproduction: From a consumer standpoint, getting the healthiest possible child is the best investment in terms of time, cost, and risk.

But even if a woman gets pregnant naturally, she is likely to be offered prenatal screening for major chromosomal abnormalities. In the U.S., prenatal testing was generally offered to women over 35 or those with high-risk pregnancies. As of 2019, more than 60% of OBGYNs had offered it as part of their standard care to all patients.

In Denmark, nearly all pregnant women choose to have their developing children screened for genetic abnormalities.

Prenatal testing used to be done later in the second trimester if an ultrasound revealed atypical development, or if parents knew they were carriers for genetic conditions. Today, that information as well as the sex of the baby can be gleaned from a mothers blood sample by the 10th week of pregnancy.

Genetic counselors are supposed to present findings with value neutrality, meaning their language and affect is not supposed to sway patients decision-making. But Zhang spoke to advocates for persons with Down syndrome who were actively lobbying health care providers to change their language, for fear that the increase in selective abortion was correlated to language that increased parental fear.

Even shifting language from risk to probability could help open parents up to choosing life, they argued.

In many of the cases Zhang learned about, the children were originally wanted sometimes desperately so but in one catastrophic moment, they became unwanted. Parental fears about their childs quality of life as well as disappointment over losing the family that they had hoped for swayed them toward abortion.

Suddenly, Zhang writes, a new power was thrust into the hands of ordinary people the power to decide what kind of life is worth bringing into the world.

The world that The Atlantic article describes is one shaped by what Notre Dame law and political science professor O. Carter Snead calls expressive individualism in his new book What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics (Harvard University Press, $39.95).

This philosophy equates being fully human with finding the unique truth within ourselves and freely constructing our individual lives to reflect it, writes Snead. It considers human relationships as transactional, formed by agreements, promises, and consent for the mutual benefits of the parties involved.

Such a philosophy, he argues, leaves us without a coherent vision of our moral obligations to one another, especially the most vulnerable. This is illustrated in Zhangs piece by a series of moral quandaries that selective abortion poses.

Pope Francis kisses Peter Lombardi, 12, of Columbus, Ohio, after the boy rode in the popemobile during his general audience in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican in 2018. (Catholic News Service/Vatican Media)

If reproductive decision-making is an individual choice, what should a society do when thousands (or millions) of individual choices result in massive demographic or sociological changes?

Is a eugenic movement brought about by a societys own choosing any less problematic than one which is forced on a people, such as the campaign to eradicate persons with disabilities designed by the Nazis or the current campaign by the Chinese government to eliminate its Uyghurs population?

Zhang uncovers what she calls the most perverse moral problem in an exchange with a Danish woman who heads the National Down Syndrome Association. The woman, who is also a mother to 18-year-old son with Down syndrome, educates expectant parents about the condition.

During one of their conversations, the teenage boy leans over and looks at his mothers phone. The title of a controversial documentary called Death to Down Syndrome was displayed on the screen, and he immediately recoiled.

The reporter realized that he was cognizant of the fact that there are people who dont want people like him to be born. Moreover, his mother supports the right to abortion, even in cases like his.

The scene illustrates the ultimate conundrum for a society that supports the unrestricted right to abortion while claiming to uphold the equality of all human beings as a foundational moral principle: A woman must convince her child that his life is valuable, dignified, and worthy of living, while also supporting the rights of others to end the life of their child with his same genetic markers.

The response of a Catholic reader to the article would seem clear-cut: Because abortion is the taking of human life in its most vulnerable stage, it violates the fundamental right of all human beings to continue their life until natural death. Abortion, as well as any reproductive technology involving the creation, testing, and destruction of embryos, must be rejected.

But Catholic teaching does not stop at the moral evaluation of the technology or the act of abortion. The Gospel goes deeper it speaks to the heart of parents who receive a devastating diagnosis. It speaks to the vocation of health care workers and geneticists to heal when they can and offer comfort when they cannot. And it speaks to families about what it means to be open to the mystery of Gods design for family life.

In a 2019 speech, Pope Francis lamented the fact that thanks to modern prenatal testing techniques, even the suspicion of an illness, and especially the certainty of a disease, changes the experience of pregnancy and causes deep distress to women and couples.

The isolation and worry about the suffering that lies ahead, the pope said, is like a silent cry, a call for help in the darkness, when faced with an illness whose outcome cannot be foreseen with certainty.

In the face of fear and isolation, parents need support from a larger community, whether through their extended family, the parish, or others who have been in their situation. Support from a community is the first antidote to the individualism and isolation of reproductive choice.

When it comes to the issue of medical language, The Atlantic article notes that while genetic counselors and obstetricians are trained and required to present genetic information in as neutral a way as possible to patients, that doesnt always happen.

Pope Francis has admonished clinicians who use the phrase incompatible with life to describe genetic conditions that correspond with short lifespans or severe physical and cognitive impairments. For one thing, where there is a living human being, there is life.

Second, he says:

No human being can ever be unfit for life, whether due to age, state of health or quality of existence. Every child who appears in a womans womb is a gift that changes a familys history, the life of fathers and mothers, grandparents and of brothers and sisters. That child needs to be welcomed, loved and nurtured.

The fact that so many parents, when faced with a diagnosis of Down syndrome or other genetic anomalies, choose abortion tells Catholics a few things about why and where the Gospel is needed.

A society that reveres health and wellness is one that will have trouble in the face of sickness, aging, and death. It needs to hear the good news that suffering has been redeemed, and that it stretches the hearts of patients, caregivers, and the people they encounter.

A scene from the movie Gattaca. (IMDB)

Being mortals, bodily decay or dysfunction will come to all of us; some members of our human family experience it more acutely or earlier than others. They should receive more care, not more marginalization, because of it.

A materialist society that reduces people to their bodies and even microscopically, to their genetic material needs to know the truth that human beings have a body and a soul. The most important quality that children have and develop is their capacity to love, something that does not depend on their physical or cognitive ability.

A consumer-driven society, one that has become accustomed to customizable, curated lifestyles, is one that considers parenthood as a fulfillment of desires or a way to construct meaning and identity. Such a society which does not pause at the ways it commodifies its children needs to be reminded to protect the little ones. And a society that has unlimited access to information desperately needs wisdom.

The opening credits of Gattaca include a cautionary line from the Book of Ecclesiastes: Consider what God has done: Who can straighten what He has made crooked?

The answer to this rhetorical question should humble us. It should also help us to see all children not as something owed, but as gifts to be received as is, with all of their challenges and strengths.

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The Genetic Information Age is here. Are we ready? - Angelus News