(LifeSiteNews) — The practice of creating “savior siblings” to heal genetic diseases such as sickle cell disease, Thalassemia, and Diamond-Blackfan Anemia in an older sibling has recently returned to the public’s attention. The story of how NBA star Carlos Boozer‘s twins Cameron and Cayden Boozer were born to save their older brother Carmani has resurfaced. The twins, now accomplished basketball players in their own right, underwent preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) on their embryonic persons in order to save Carmani, who was born with sickle cell disease.
Savior siblings are created through In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) and undergo biopsies, through PGD, to guarantee that the embryos don’t carry the genetic disease the parents are seeking to heal in their other child, and that the embryos are compatible tissue matches to the recipient’s immune system so that they don’t reject the donation.
There have been only a handful of savior siblings cases so far, and the majority of the “saviors” were created for their bone marrow. Publicized cases include those of Kavya Solanki, who was born to treat her seven-year-old brother suffering from Thalassaemia Major; Marissa Ayala, for her nineteen year old sister suffering from myelogenous leukemia; Adam Nah, for his six-year-old sister suffering from Fanconi-anemia; and Jamie, for his four-year-old brother suffering from Diamond-Blackfan Anaemia. In the Boozers’ case, Cameron and Cayden were conceived to give their brother stem cells from their umbilical cords, and Carmani made a full recovery.
Human beings as a means to an end
While it is understandable to want to heal your chronically ill child, and absolutely heartbreaking to watch your children suffer, there are factors to consider when we create children for the purpose of saving other children’s lives.
The first consideration is that we should never treat another human being as a means to an end, which is exactly what happens through this process. Every human is intrinsically valuable for no other reason than that they are human, but creating savior siblings continues a culture that treats people as means to certain ends instead of unique human beings who are worthy of being loved for their innate worth and value. Cece Boozer even admitted that she felt guilty because her twins were created “more out of love for Carmani. It wasn’t out of love for them.” Parental self-sacrificial love doesn’t expect anything in return, but creating children for this purpose asks them to come into existence to sacrifice for the desires of their parents.
Also, when we create human persons with the foreknowledge that most if not all of them will perish, we are treating our children as disposable refuse. Through the IVF process, which treats human beings as disposable commodities and means to particular ends, a deadly game of trial and error is played in hundreds of laboratories with the lives of thousands of embryonic persons annually. Moreover, the surrogacy process, an industry dependent upon IVF, degrades women to the base level of mere incubating objects.
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The Boozers created 10 embryonic human beings through the IVF process, and out of the 10, only two fit the requirements for being worthy of transfer. The parents decided to transfer both embryos, and both embryos successfully implanted. We don’t know what happened to the other eight human beings, but we can guess. They would have met one of the fates of all unwanted embryos: being discarded, donated to scientific research, or put on ice indefinitely .
While there have been no public cases of savior siblings born for the purpose of organ donation, when we treat human beings as a means to an end, what’s to stop the creation of children to save an older sibling who really needs a kidney or liver transplant? Since informed consent is the responsibility of the parents in these cases, the law could eventually allow for parents to consent to their infants’ donating life-saving organs for their other children. The law permits parents to consent to medical procedures that are medically necessary, or if the “benefits to both … outweigh the risks associated with the donation and transplantation.” Taking stem cells and bone marrow from the savior sibling does not benefit the donor, so where’s the line?
When we forget life is a gift, it becomes a “thing” that we treat as mere property—just another something among a multitude of other somethings we can manipulate and control. This is what expanding access to IVF allows on top of the already intrinsic disregard for human life inherent in the process, and those of us who recognize the inherent worth and dignity of every human person from the moment of fertilization must continue to push for this child- commodifying industry to be eliminated, not expanded.
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