There is a huge problem with how all this is described. The ethicists and practitioners talk about gender selection and choosing characteristics. They won’t be honest and say, “We kill the ones you don’t want.”

Would you be impressed with a doctor who administered tests, not with a view to treatment, but with only the two options, kill or let live? “Your blood test is positive, swallow this pill. Nurse! Another trolley for the morgue.”

Don’t our unborn babies deserve the care and protection we demand ourselves?

Michael Hutton, Ariah Park

Have I mentioned previously that these ideas are often the stuff of science fiction?

The late Isaac Asimov explored some of the implications of eliminating disease and weakness, and the resulting longevity, in his Robot novels: “The Caves of Steel” “The Naked Sun” and “The Robots of Dawn” along with “Robots and Empire” much later.

Even he, a thorough-going evolutionist and definitely anti-creationist, saw some of the unpalatable implications.

Naturally he didn’t see the kinds of philosophical and moral objections we raise, and his novels are replete with images of a rigid totalitarian society.

Arthur C Clarke also looked at these in his 2001 and 2010 novels, and I can only presume that Frank Herbert went off his rocker in the later novels of his Dune series. I couldn’t stand the later ones, trying to figure out the philosophy, so I gave up.

These big names of sci-fi have had a little-recognised but major influence on the thinking of the last two or three generations, and paved the way for the kind of thinking we see today to be accepted as mainstream.

John Angelico

David Skinner, UK

Yes, quite right. And I note that as a believer you used the word “blessed” – and rightly so. But notice that Savulescu smuggles in the word “gift”. He is a secularist, but even he has to refer to talents and abilities as ‘gifts’. But of course there can only be gifts if there are givers. Who is the giver? We believe that it is God who gives the gift of life to each person, and that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14).

But for the secularist, we just have whatever nature dishes out to us. Certainly these are not gifts, but the mere results of genetics and purposeless, unguided evolution. Thus this is ultimately a battle of worldviews: the Judeo-Christian worldview versus the secular-humanist worldview.

Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch

There are good things that come from not having the world handed to you on a silver platter from birth.

Natasha Sim

Darwin and his ilk have much to answer for.

Just a little aside… the term ‘playing God’ doesn’t actually insinuate that God plays games with us; it only refers to a person trying to play the role of God. It’s like ‘playing doctor’ as a child which is simply putting oneself into a role play as a doctor not suggesting that doctors ‘play at what they do, or play with their patients’. However whereas role play as a doctor it is an appropriate thing for us to do, not so ‘playing God’ for obvious reasons.

Garth Penglase

creationontheweb.com/content/view/6094/

This is as bizarre as it gets in this genetic engineering nightmare, just proving there is’ nothing new under the sun’ (Ecclesiastes)! This whole topic is so ‘yuk factor’ it is a sign of how desensitised our society has become that Julian S. can spout such evil nonsense and people are not immediately repulsed. I have always had great trouble with the often used argument and the terminology of ‘ playing God ‘ as God dosen’t play games with any of us and dole out imperfection and genetic mistakes. Rather the whole understanding of the Fallen and cursed Creation because of Man’s rebellion in our Original father, (and our inheritance of a ‘sin’ nature) Adam needs to be explained and appreciated.

“A decade ago, when the newly opened Russian government archives revealed details of biologist Ilia Ivanov’s attempts to create an ape-human hybrid in the 1920s, it made international headlines. Why had Ivanov’s project, which included expensive expeditions into Africa, been both sanctioned and financed by the Bolshevik government at a time when few Russians were allowed to leave the country? Some suggested that the military commanders aimed to breed super-strong hairy ape-man warriors for what The Sun in London referred to as ‘Stalin’s mutant ape army’.1 However, neither Ivanov’s nor the government’s actual motives for the project were spelled out clearly in the archive documents.”

creationontheweb.com/content/view/5198/

Hitler’s ‘master race children’, Lebensborns are haunted by their past and the promiscuous and unethical way they were genetically selected for ‘breeding’. Here are two classic Hitler quotes. The underpinning behind this modern day designer babies push is blatantly evolutionary evil worldviews and axioms.

“Hitler justified his racism by appealing to Darwinian science. He wrote, ‘The stronger must dominate and not mate with the weaker, which would signify the sacrifice of its own higher nature. Only the born weakling can look upon this principle as cruel, and if he does so it is merely because he is of a feebler nature and narrower mind; for if such a law did not direct the process of evolution then the higher development of organic life would not be conceivable at all’. ‘If Nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle with an inferior one; because in such a case all her efforts,throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile’.”

“Between 1935 and 1945, there were born some 10,000 children in Germany and an estimated 9,000 in Norway as part of a Nazi genetic engineering plan to build up an Aryan ‘master-race’ or super-breed of humanity. This scheme was known as the Lebensborn or ‘Fountain of Life’ program. Special clinics were set up where SS men were encouraged to mate with blue-eyed, blonde Nordic girls who had no Jewish ancestry, in order to produce ‘racially pure’ German offspring. The resultant babies were then brought up in the foster care of dedicated Nazi couples or reared in special orphanages. There were at least ten Lebensborn homes in Germany, and nine in Nazi-occupied Norway, where the unmarried pregnant women could give birth in secret away from their homes. The babies were christened in a ritual in which an SS dagger was held over them as the mother swore allegiance to Nazi ideology. If any of the children born into the program were disabled, they were killed or sent to concentration camps.”

“Instead of becoming part of the new master race, the children procreated in the Lebensborn homes suffered greatly after WWII, with the collapse of Nazi Germany. As illegitimate babies from a Nazi propagation program, many lived out their lives in confusion and ostracism. For others, discovering the truth was equally traumatic. In Norway, those born of Norwegian mothers and German soldiers—‘children of the enemy’—faced pitiless discrimination and were often harassed, beaten, and called ‘Nazi swine’. In November 2006, some 40 of the survivors met in Wernigerode, Germany, (‘where the Harz Lebensborn home contributed over 1,100 babies to the scheme’) for mutual encouragement and to confront their past life of shame and the horror of finding out they had been bred in clinics to be the next generation of Nazi elite. Those present ‘showed little of the aura of the supermen and women they were created to be. They were racked with the ailments of ordinary aging, some stooped, some portly, many dark-haired, plenty with poor vision and hearing impairments’.”

“Lebensborn child Ursula Jaeckel, now 62, told how she was abused by other children and by her foster mother, after the war was lost. Gisela Heidenreich, born in a Lebensborn home in Norway, was the daughter of an SS commander and a German secretary. Her childhood was filled with abuse and rage from her foster parents and her fellow school children. ‘We were created to be a super race and we ended up merely asking, “Who am I? How did I get here?”’ she said. Helga Kahrau says, ‘Being a Lebensborn child is still a source of shame.’ This shame is the bitter legacy for those who were produced to rule the world—innocent pawns in the Nazis’ diabolical game.”

creationontheweb.com/content/view/6111/

As a matter of complete contrast this is such an uplifting story of two parents and their special baby. Singer, Savulescu and Trounsen would undoubtedly sentence to death little Jenny: creationontheweb.com/content/view/6020/.

Jennifer Parfenovics

hnn.us/articles/1796.html

Garth Penglase

You’ve probably heard the question posed before: “A woman is pregnant and already has 8 children, 3 are blind, 2 are deaf, and she has syphilis. Would you recommend that she have an abortion? If you said yes, then you would have killed Beethoven.”

We have been warned in books such as (1984 and Animal Farm etc.), plays, movies (Gattaca, Blade Runner) and by philosophers of such dangers as eugenics, cloning, growing humans for parts (stem-cells etc.), and about the rise of a centralised all-powerful one world government, the total erosion of our privacy through unrestricted monitoring and tracking, and the direct control of us through economics (gov’t registered to be able to buy and sell), yet we keep on buying into this stuff – it is ‘sold’ to us so easily, often with the lamest excuses. We’ve said ‘yes’ to the killing of our unborn children, ‘yes’ to gov’t monitoring of citizens, ‘yes’ to the destruction of the basic family unit and to marriage as a essential and worthwhile life-long enterprise, ‘yes’ to cloning, ‘yes’ to growing humans for parts, ‘yes’ to the elevation of personal rights over the good of community, ‘yes’ to the culture of Me, ‘yes’ to protection of our economic interests while millions die of hunger and thirst, ‘yes’ to genetically modified food, ‘yes’ to huge government who we expect to ‘save’ us and tell us what we want to hear… I mean, really it’s not like we haven’t been warned – yet we buy into it all like lemmings.

Garth Penglase