Tea at Trianon: Three-Parent Babies

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Three-Parent Babies

From Through Catholic Lenses:

First of all, three-parent children involve procreation outside of a loving marital act which is the moral way to make babies. Every baby deserves to be the fruit of an act of parental love. Second, this inevitably kills half the babies created while they are still one-day-old embryos and puts other embryos at high risk of death.

Also, children have a right to know their parents. Any use of donor eggs means that someone they don’t know is a parent. Children also have a right to two parents but this procedure makes them the product of three parents. However, there is a new issue regarding modifying genes in heritable ways. We all inherit our mother’s mitochondrial DNA so mixing it with different nuclear DNA creates a range of issues. Will it create health issues down the road? What will the result be a few generations down the road from the passing on of this combination of mitochondrial and nuclear DNA? (Read more.)