By The Blaze. Forty-eight babies were born at Baylor Scott & White All Saints Medical Center over a period of less than two days this past week, setting a new record for the Fort Worth, Texas, hospital, KTXA-TV reported.

The number of births amounted to an average of more than one baby an hour, and the nursery is bracing for more, according to the report. . .

“There’s always talk about full moon. We definitely had a big full moon this week,” OB-GYN Dr. Jamie Erwin told the TV station. “Maybe there is something to that as well, maybe not. But it’s always a busy time of the year.”

Texas state records back it up. Most babies in the state are born in either July, August or September, the report states. (Read more from “Record-Setting Baby Boom at U.S. Hospital — 48 Born in 41 Hours” HERE)

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It’s a Baby Boom! 48 Babies Delivered in 41 Hours at Baylor

By CBS. The nursery at Baylor Scott & White All Saints Medical Center – Fort Worth has never been as full as it has in the last 41 hours. And, the halls have never been so busy.

Since June 26, 48 babies were born in less than 2 days. That’s an average of more than one baby an hour. And, there’s definitely a lively discussion here about why. . .

Nursing director Michelle Stemley’s phone blew up with messages on Wednesday.

“People were asking about staffing,” she recalled. “I was like, ‘what’s going on?’ ”

But, she said the hospital was prepared. Extra staff was called in; pizza ordered and even after 48 babies in a short span of time, they are ready for more. “We are trained for this,” she said. (Read more from “It’s a Baby Boom! 48 Babies Delivered in 41 Hours at Baylor” HERE)

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By WND. The state of Michigan is being sued by parents of newborns’ whose blood was sampled by the state without a warrant.

“It has been well-established that drawing a person’s blood for analysis constitutes a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment,” explains the complaint filed against the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, various doctors and the Michigan Neonatal Biobank Inc.

“The Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution guarantees the right of persons to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, including the state of Michigan, its agencies, and those that work for in in cahoots with those agencies.”

While the state program to “seize” blood from newborns for testing against various diseases “is a noble public policy idea,” the method that the state as implemented “violates the United States Constitution,” the complaint contends.

The lawsuit seeks an order to stop the practice, destroy the data illegally collected and “return to the parents all blood samples and spots of infants which defendants have caused to be seized and stored indefinitely without informed consent.” (Read more from “State Sued for Taking Babies’ Blood Without a Warrant” HERE)

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Lawsuit Alleges Michigan Stole Blood of Newborn Babies

By Associated Press. . .Philip Ellison filed the federal lawsuit on behalf of the parents, saying Michigan’s practice of drawing infant blood is unconstitutional, MLive.com reported. The lawsuit also alleges that there aren’t protections in place to stop police or others from accessing information that can be derived from the stored blood samples.

“Essentially, the state has stolen consent from parents,” said Ellison, an attorney based in Saginaw County . . .

The blood of more than five million people is being stored, according to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. (Read more from “Lawsuit Alleges Michigan Stole Blood of Newborn Babies” HERE)

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I could not swallow the horror I felt as I read this story. Thanks to a jewelry company called Baby Bee Hummingbirds, a couple in Australia has turned their seven “extra” embryos conceived through IVF into a necklace. Yes, you heard me. The mother is wearing her babies around her neck.

Most people do not understand why the Catholic Church refuses to approve the practice of in-vitro fertilization, or any form of artificial insemination, or any method of conception at all apart from sexual intercourse. The Church teaches that all such means of conception are morally wrong. The reasons are profound, thoughtful and humble. If you’d like to hear it from the horse’s mouth, read this, especially CCC 2375 – 2378.

But allow me to say it succinctly this way: What you manufacture, you own. It belongs to you, and you call the shots with authority. What you manufacture, you can control.

THAT is precisely why it is morally wrong to manufacture children. Many people will object to the word “manufacture” here, but it’s the only accurate term. Babies are ordered up and created in a lab, purchased and paid for by adults who have commissioned their creation. That’s manufacturing.

Babies are not ours to control. Human life is not ours to manipulate in that way. We have no right to create life, keep it in some suspended animation, and then decide to destroy it whenever it suits us. We are not God.

We do not own our children. We have no claim on their lives. It is not for us to decide whether they live or die and when. The Lord God is the giver and creator of life. We can only receive our children as gifts. No one can demand a gift, or claim any right to receive a gift.

Assuming the Prerogative of God

It is proper and good for a husband and wife to desire children, since that is precisely the purpose of marriage. Children are the gift and fruit of marriage; the visible result of married love as God intended. I don’t minimize the heartache and pain of couples who are unable to naturally conceive a child. Such infertility is a heavy cross to bear.

Even so, we are not justified in using any means necessary to create a child. Our longing is not a free pass to assume for ourselves the prerogative of God.

But, you may say, God has blessed our modern medicine with such amazing capabilities! How could it be wrong to avail ourselves of what modern medicine can do?

Because God has ordained marital intercourse as the method and means of procreation. It should be evident by now that bad things result when we separate sex from babies. When we believe we have the right and authority to decide when a child is conceived, how a child is conceived, and even whether or not that conceived child gets to keep living, we have grievously sinned.

We are no longer seeing the child as a human person; a gift from God. Rather, we have turned the child into a thing we can manipulate according to our own desires. We take the child as our right to have or not have as we wish. We demand new life, and destroy new life, when it pleases us.

Where’s the Humanity?

This couple in Australia said that donating those embryos “was not an option.” Why not? Why was life not an option? Seven human beings were denied the chance to live, after having been manufactured at their parents’ request, and are now mummified and encapsulated in a crystal heart on a chain. They’ve been turned into an ornament. An adornment. A thing.

See what I mean? What you manufacture, you own. You control. By that thinking, those babies had no inherent, inviolable right to live if their parents did not wish to have them.

The article also says the couple felt “the annual storage fee was an added financial strain, and disposing of them unimaginable.” We’ve made them, but now it’s just too expensive to keep them. So the babies must go away.

I am glad that “disposing of them” was unimaginable. Just typing the phrase “disposing of them” makes me want to vomit. But really, are those seven babies any less dead and disposed of now, hanging around their mother’s neck as an accessory? No, they weren’t rinsed down the drain. But their humanity was not respected.

Babies are Not a Commodity

We cannot afford to be lulled by sentimentalism. This is not honoring of human life. But this sort of thing will become more and more popular, and more people will celebrate this as a beautiful memorial, a truly special way to “keep” those precious babies you just couldn’t let live but didn’t want to “dispose of.”

I’m sorry, but it isn’t beautiful at all. It’s macabre. And I’ll say it — it’s depraved.

We simply must find the courage to recognize how wrong we are to treat human life this way. We may believe our intentions are good and right, but our actions are not justified. We keep pushing the envelope farther and farther, awarding to ourselves more and more power, more and more “rights,” yet we fail to recognize how we dehumanize our children. Pride is urging us to make ourselves like gods, and modern medicine cheers us on.

Just because we can do something, it does not follow that we ought to do it, or that we have any right to do it. Nowhere is this truth more immovable than as it applies to human life. Babies are not a commodity, and we have no right to manufacture them at will. No one — absolutely no one — has any right to a child.

The very same reasoning that approves of IVF condones abortion. They are two sides of the same coin. That will be a bitter pill for many to swallow, and I don’t say that viciously. But we must honestly confront the mess we’ve made.

There should never be any such thing as an “extra” embryo. (For more from the author of “Turning ‘Extra’ Embryos Into Jewelry: We Must Stop Manufacturing Children” please click HERE)

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What if we could use science to eliminate disease, deformity, and mental disabilities? What if the tools of modern technology could make us smarter, stronger, and more beautiful?

What if we could put an end, once and for all, to every mother’s fear that their child might be born with something not quite right?

These are the questions Chinese researchers are trying to answer. They’ve recently announced a breakthrough in using genetic engineering to remove certain defects in human embryos responsible for congenital conditions. This should be good news, right? After all, what is science for, if not to help us live longer, healthier, and more productive lives? The problem is, this kind of thinking has taken hold in America once before, and with disastrous consequences.

In the early 20th century, science was all the rage. Educated men thought they could use their superior knowledge to improve the human race. What a noble endeavor! With knowledge of genetics recently having come into prominence thanks to the works of Charles Darwin, college professors and men of science were eager to apply the findings in a practical way. If traits are passed down from generation to generation, they reasoned, then the species can be improved by choosing only to pass down good traits, while screening out bad ones. This process was known as eugenics, and its proponents included many well-respected people, most notably President Woodrow Wilson, the only president ever to hold a doctoral degree.

But how do you stop people with “undesirable” traits from breeding and passing them on to future generations? Easy, by forced sterilization. In the same way you would neuter a dog to keep it from reproducing, state governments across America passed laws permitting the forced sterilization of people deemed to be insane, feebleminded, deformed, or otherwise posing a menace to the health of the species. This frequently included criminals, as criminality was at the time believed to be an inherited characteristic. All told, 60,000 Americans lost their right to reproduce at the hands of a scientific community that insisted it could improve mankind.

Ultimately, the horrors of the Nazi movement in Germany, which took eugenics to extremes undreamt of by most Americans, soured the national appetite for forced sterilization. By the mid-1970s the practice came to an end even in mental institutions, but the Supreme Court decision finding such sterilization constitutional has never been overturned.

Now, what does this have to do with the Chinese research on embryos? Surely such direct manipulation of the egg will result in more healthy reproduction, not less, and requires no interference with individual freedoms, right? Don’t be so sure.

Imagine a world where, for the right price, you can guarantee that your children won’t have any genetic defects, that they will be tall, strong, resistant to disease, symmetrical, and intelligent, all through a simple medical procedure. Now imagine that not everyone can afford this procedure. What do you think will happen after a couple of generations? The “normal” people, unaltered by genetic modification, will not possibly be able to compete with the supermen and women created by science. They will be inferior in every way, and thus ineligible for the best jobs, unable to keep up in the best schools, and forget about sports or any kind of athletic competition. Social mobility will not be an option, and their children will be doomed to the same fate, a permanent underclass at the mercy of their betters.

How long could such a system persist? How long before the genetically inferior humans become mere leeches dependent on state charity, or else utilized as menial slaves for everyone else, or perhaps be outright forbidden from procreating? It sounds like science fiction, but it’s a simple and logical progression from a system that allows some people to be dramatically improved by genetic engineering while others are left behind.

Aside from these practical concerns, there are any number of moral and ethical problems with tinkering with human life. Modern medicine has indeed done wonders for our way of life, but there is a good reason why many governments have banned human cloning and other such genetic experiments. Blind allegiance to science without stopping to consider broader philosophical questions of humanity, liberty, and justice, can only end badly, as history has taught us on more than one occasion. Engineering works great for building bridges; It’s much less advisable for designing societies. (For more from the author of “Designer Babies and the Chilling Echoes of Eugenics” please click HERE)

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A technique to make “three-parent babies” was voted into law by the British Parliament in February 2015, but it wasn’t a “three-parent” baby born in the UK that made an ethical splash heard around the world — it was a baby boy born to a Jordanian couple treated in Mexico by a team of U.S. doctors. This procedure, called mitochondrial replacement therapy, is not legal in the U.S., so Dr. John Zhang and his team at the New Hope Fertility Center in New York City traveled to Mexico to treat the Jordanian woman.

The woman, identified as Ibtisam Shaban, has Leigh syndrome, which is a fatal disease affecting the developing nervous system, reported the New Scientist. The genes for Leigh syndrome are in the mitochondrial DNA of the mother. While Shaban did not exhibit symptoms of Leigh syndrome, she lost her first two children to the disease at ages six and eight months.

The procedure used to produce the baby, Abrahim Hassan, is surrounded by a flurry of ethical questions. In his case, Dr. Zhang removed the nucleus (which houses the majority of a person’s DNA) and placed it in the “shell” of a donor’s egg containing healthy mitochondria DNA. Another technique is to fertilize both the mother’s egg and the donor egg with the father’s sperm, then replace the donor’s nucleus with the mother’s. This technique destroys one embryo. While the mitochondrial transfer procedure is being hailed as a great accomplishment for those who have or are treating mitochondrial diseases, it also raises several serious ethical questions.

Altering the Germ Line

A child with mitochondrial DNA therapy will have DNA from three people, hence the term “three-parent babies.” Since mitochondrial DNA is passed from mother to child, females with three parents will permanently alter the “germ line” by passing the altered DNA to their children and so on. Dr Trevor Stammers, Program Director in Bioethics and Medical Law at St. Mary’s University, said, “Even if these babies are born they will have to be monitored all their lives, and their children will have to be as well. We do not yet know the interaction between the mitochondria and nuclear DNA. To say that it is the same as changing a battery is facile. It’s an extremely complex thing.”

Playing God

Some have charged that experimenting with DNA is “playing God,” and producing “genetically-modified” humans. “These regulations would authorize the crossing of a rubicon for the first time,” said British MP Fiona Bruce who chairs the All Party Parliamentary Pro-Life Group. “It would authorize germ line therapy… to alter the genes of an individual. This is something defined by the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights as effectively constituting eugenics.”

Only Boys Allowed

At this time, the procedure is only recommended to produce male embryos, since mitochondrial diseases are passed down through females. According to Science News, the Institute of Medicine in the United States determined “it would be ethical to produce male embryos using the technique,” but as of this year federal laws still prohibit the method. This means that female embryos would be destroyed in search of a male who would not pass on mitochondrial diseases to future generations.

Risk of Crossing Ethical Boundaries

British MP Jacob Rees Mogg said once the lines have been crossed, there’s no going back. “I think the difficulty is that it starts a process which is very hard to see where it stops,” he said. “Once the germ line is changed at one point you decide that isn’t allowable in other cases … there is a very clear boundary that babies cannot be genetically altered. And once you have decided that they can you have done something very profound.” Bruce concurs, “We … have approved a technique and what that technique could be used for in the future who knows,” she said. “We’re opening a Pandora’s box.”

The concerns around what amounts to having two mothers could present a problem in the future as child custody battles grow increasingly complicated, even as same-sex couples fight for custody of a child who biologically belongs to only one of them. Others worry that the legalizing of this technique will lead to creating “designer babies” on demand. While scientists may not be able to select a preferred eye color or hair color now, selecting embryos based on sex is already being done. Selecting other desired characteristics is only a matter of time. Once the laws are in place to perform mitochondrial DNA transfers in the U.S., the question of designer babies will be a nonissue.

Genetic Abnormalities

Perhaps one of the most alarming findings has to do with the very real possibility of genetic abnormalities for the three-parent babies. “There are numerous serious risks associated with this technology,” said Dr. Paul Knoepfler, Associate Professor at the University of California, Davis. “These include most notably the possibility that developmentally disabled or deceased babies will be produced. Aberrations could lead to developmental defects in babies or also manifest in later life as increased rates of aging [or] cancer.”

Dr. Knoepfler’s concerns are hardly unreasonable. In the early 1990s, embryologists in the U.S. performed a similar technique involving DNA from three people and the results were unsuccessful. The babies who were born later developed genetic disorders, including two infants born with a missing X chromosome and two who later had serious developmental disorders. The practice was banned after the problems were discovered.

Even with the mitochondrial DNA therapy there are no guarantees that the baby will be born without the mitochondrial disease the parents were hoping to avoid. Scientists are aware of mitochondrial carryover during nuclear transfer, also known as Genetic Drift — that is, the mitochondrial DNA of the mother carrying the disease could still carryover to the created embryo and eventually take over anyway, as reported in the journal Cell Stem Cell. Professor Mary Herbert of Newcastle University commented that “we don’t know what it means for development, but it’s alerted us to the fact that we really need to work hard to get as close to zero carry-over as we can.”

Following the UK’s legalization of the procedure, MEPs wrote to Prime Minister David Cameron, calling the practice “unethical.” In an open letter, the group warned Cameron that EU law prohibited genetic alterations that will carry on to the next generation. “Your proposals violate the fundamental standards of human dignity and integrity of the person,” they wrote. “Modification of the genome is unethical and cannot be permitted.” The Center for Genetics and Society (CGS) said it was “a historic mistake” and warned the technique “will turn children into biological experiments.”

CGS added, “… [T]hey will result in children with DNA from three different people in every cell of their bodies, which will impact a large range of traits in unknowable ways, and introduce genetic changes that will be passed down to future generations through the female line.” (For more from the author of “First Baby Born With Controversial ‘Three-Parent’ Technique” please click HERE)

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