From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Feb 21 2000 - 19:30:24 MST
At 09:30 AM 21/02/00 -0800, Cynthia wrote:
>According to what I have read, Thalidomide actually didn't cause birth
>defect, it prevented spontaneous abortions children who already had
>birth defects. And aside from interfering with mother natures plan,
I'm pretty sure this is wrong, since time of ingestion correlates with the
kinds of deformities seen. (Of course this would be true as well if
spontaneous miscarriage is averted, since morphogenesis follows a time
table; hmmm...)
When this interpretation also occurred to me many years ago, I realised
that if it were true, Catholics and other godbotherers of a certain kind
might be *morally obliged to take thalidomide whenever the chances of
pregnancy arose, to ensure no premature loss of immortal baptisable souls!
The argument here is that if a foetus aborts, it presumably has no chance
to benefit from the sacraments God has provided as the pathway into
salvation, poor little things. It's not true that `every sperm is sacred'
in theology, but every embryo certainly is. So, just as all hitech means of
care must be used`to keep alive premmies and very old suffering people, so
too, I reckon, Catholics and their thinkalikes must be obliged to take
drugs that prevent `spontaneous' abortions. True, these might be regarded
as part of the kindly plan of the Lord, but then so must be any infection
or life-threatening physical defect that can be fixed by antibiotics or
surgery, yet these are *required* of the faithful. So I imagined a future
in which the religious were obliged to give birth to every possible
deformed and mutant offspring, sapping their resources and driving out the
last few intelligent members. It was a cruel and nasty fantasy, but then so
was the system of `thought' that gave rise to it...
Damien
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