Archives for 2009

A US clinic is preparing to offer the service of screening embryos, pre-implantation, for cosmetic factors and sex, not only for disease or birth defects. We are talking here about couples who are already having multiple embryos created, and then selecting one that meets its criteria to bring to term. So far, the selection is only being made on the basis of avoiding medical problems; the “leap” here is to allowing it to be made on other criteria as well. And all kinds of people who are fine with the former are objecting to the latter.

But Dr Gillian Lockwood, a UK fertility expert and member of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists’ ethics committee, questioned whether is was morally right to be using the science in this way. “If it gets to the point where we can decide which gene or combination of genes are responsible for blue eyes or blonde hair, what are you going to do with all those other embryos that turn out like me to be ginger with green eyes?” “

Just as I can’t understand why aborting a baby because it’s the “wrong” sex is worse than aborting a baby because you broke up with its father, I don’t see why choosing one embryo and destroying the rest is worse for cosmetic reasons than for medical reasons. Certainly the desire to have a child without a disease is much more sympathetic than the desire to have a blond child; but if the issue of morality here is creating 8 embryos with the knowledge that 7 of them will be destroyed, the reason why one is chosen and the rest destroyed is pretty much beside the point.

Some countries have figured this out:

Italian fertility law does not permit the creation of surplus embryos or selective testing. Ms Quintavalle said that was “one sure way to avoid the slippery slope”.

Sounds good to me.

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Andrea might argue that it is less heinous to select for cosmetics. One could argue we already do that when we have kids the natural way–we choose mates we are attracted to–and that might mean marrying a man who is tall, dark and handsome, or blonde, or what have you. What we don’t do is test prospective mates for their immunity to disease. In any event, it is scarier to me to choose embryos for medical reasons. Because now we’re getting into the Perfectability of the Human Race and all that has ever meant in the past is really bad things.

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Brigitte dislikes both: Seems to me breeding for looks can be every bit as bad as the other kind.

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Andrea adds: I won’t disagree with you, Brigitte.

Anyone watch Gattaca, oops I mean Bio-Dad on the CBC the other night? And listen to some specialist in California talk about his comfort level choosing embryos by sex? And how he would be fine with checking embryos for genetic disposition to disease?

A long, looooooong piece in the Toronto Star today by “national affairs writer” Linda Diebel on the Liberal leader’s love life. They wonder why newspapers are in such trouble but they shouldn’t, not when they run such admiring, uncritical, adoringly crafted puff. About a politician’s love life. Blech. Like Michelle Malkin would say, we need a drool bucket.

But that’s not what bugs me. Well, it does. But that’s not really the worst. What is particularly annoying about that piece is the absence of any kind of criticism for a somewhat sordid affair (both Mr. Ignatieff and his current wife were once married to other people, and he walked out on his wife of 18 years with whom he had two children to be with Ms. Zsohar) and a complete lack of restraint on the part of the two lovers, who seem very happy to share their personal history with the nation, even the bits that are (and should be) shameful.

I don’t begrudge their happiness or anything. And while I am of the “marry right and marry once” old-fashioned school, I try not to judge those who get a false start too harshly. But golly. The casual way these people describe walking away from marriages like one walks out on a boring movie is quite despicable. And they’re in their 60s… You’d kind of forgive that sort of ditzy bean-spilling exercise on the part of a cute starlet, but coming from adults who ought to qualify as “mature”, it’s just so… icky.

In the most treasured classics, lovers face obstacles, delays and misunderstandings that sweep them to the brink of despair. They come from different worlds, sometimes disliking each other at the outset. With each separation, tension builds, until a final plot twist seals their fate.

On a March 1995 evening, such a twist of plot occurred in the life of Zsuzsanna Zsohar, when the doorbell rang in her Holland Park flat in central London. It’s likely she divined the significance of the moment before answering, being someone who values books like the very air she breathes.

Standing there was Michael Ignatieff, carrying a plastic bag. He’d just done an interview at the BBC and said only, “Can I stay?”

“And, he did,” says Zsohar, now married to the new Liberal leader and living in Ottawa. “He’d made up his mind what he wanted to do. I didn’t make up his mind. He did.”

On a recent afternoon at Stornoway, the residence of the official opposition leader in upscale Rockcliffe Park, she recounts this exhilarating but painful period in their lives. Until that March night, Ignatieff, author, late-show TV host and Canadian expat, lived with his English wife, Susan Barrowclough, and their two children in London. Two years earlier, he was doing a television series on ethnic nationalism, Blood and Belonging, co-produced by the BBC, and it fell to Zsohar, books promotion/publicity manager for BBC Enterprises, to market the accompanying book. Reluctantly.

[…]

As they worked together over two years, she realized he actually was “a nice man.” There was chemistry, but “we broke up because he was married… You go back, you sort it out – I think he sees himself very much as a family man… So we were colleagues, we worked together but we weren’t actually romantically linked. He went home, you know, he lived with his wife and children, and I lived in my own flat.”

So, you weren’t actually romantically linked yet you “broke up”? I know I’ve been away from the dating scene for a while, but, um, how does that work?

When the split came, it caused a frisson in gossipy London town. Ignatieff had mined his family to write about domestic bliss and the joys of fatherhood, and this was too rich to let slip.

“Welcome to the Late Show; I’ve left my wife,” mocked a headline in the Evening Standard, over a story saying:

“The Age of the New Man, it is said, is drawing to a close. Right on cue, his patron saint – the don, philosopher and sensitive novelist, Michael Ignatieff – has fallen from his pedestal. After 18 years of happy marriage in Islington, Michael has up and walked out, setting up home with a lovely young BBC press officer, Susannah (sic) Zsohar.”

The lovely young thing was 48; in September she turns 62.

Zsohar shrugs. “I couldn’t break up his marriage. I wasn’t 20… To a lot of people, it was difficult to understand: If you leave, why do you leave for someone of your own age? Somebody who’s not a bimbo? (I) really didn’t fit the `bimbo’ category. You remember – we were not spring chickens!”

She jokes, but this was no easy time. It was, she says, “a very, very bitter and difficult divorce – difficult because he really walked out – but not on his kids.

“Around that time, Michael actually gave a talk in Canada (about) parents’ responsibility to children. It’s a very interesting piece because it says adults are also responsible for their own happiness. They are responsible for their children’s happiness, yes, but they are also responsible for their own happiness, providing you never leave your children, never abandon responsibility for them.”

Right. You can’t break up his marriage even when you do. And it’s perfectly cool for a father to go live with someone else, as long as he never “abandons responsibility” for his children… Gosh, what self-serving drivel. Could this story be more appalling?

Last night I could not go to listen the abortion debate at Ottawa University because I had tickets for Dar Williams. (I was sorry about the conflict.) She’s a beautiful woman, with a beautiful voice and I absolutely love folk guitar music. Transports me right back to the good days—suddenly I’m eating smores and wearing my favourite scratchy Chilean knit sweater for chilly summer evenings.

I got a guitar when I was 16. I really wanted one. First, when I asked for a guitar for my birthday, my parents bought me a keyboard. A brief discussion of definitions and how I could not live out my dad’s lifelong dream of being great on the organ—yes, the organ—and we finally came home with the correct instrument–a classical guitar. I began teaching myself the necessary chords to be able to croon John Denver—leaving many wondering why my dad didn’t stick to his guns and keep the keyboard.

Over years of practicing (annually, or so), oddly enough, I haven’t improved. After breakups with boyfriends, I’d teach myself mournful songs—by playing them on CD repeat—I believe this is called the  “learning by ear” method which works, it really works—to drive roommates clinically insane. “Baby can I hold you,” by Tracy Chapman is one such hit that I can still play today—yes that’s right, Paul—”sorry, is all that you can’t say…years (well, it was actually months) gone by, but still words don’t come easily like sorry, like sorry…but you can say baby—baby can I hold you tonight…”

Where was I? On genetic anomalies, that’s where. When I go to these folk fests, invariably there is more than a subtle undercurrent of anti-Bush, anti-war, left wing, now newly-anti-Palin vibes. Well, it’s more than vibes—the singers just come right on out and say it. It’s generally fairly low key, a lot of these people aren’t the excitable type, made less so by their ardent support for healing herbal medicinal treatments…though not always, as with Ani DiFranco who I heard in Calgary back in 2006.

But when I go to these concerts I’m transported away from life as I know it, life as a pro-lifer, life in the policy lane—until such time as the singer begins to make fun of Sarah Palin. As happened last night. At which point the CBC-cheering crowd in the bar is laughing up a storm and I’m right back where I live and work, which was not generally the intended point for my evening.

Dar Williams, by the way—she can say whatever she wants. She’s funny, and she made fun of “her own” last night too—saying “she knows who she runs with” and describing an offended activist type who couldn’t handle one particular concert in Maine when Dar drank from a plastic water bottle—Poland Springs! the audacity—on stage. Said activist was irate—something about poison leaching from plastic to the water… One should never be a humourless activist! Humour means you can say whatever the heck you want—and of course, Dar, up on stage at her own concert, all beautiful and talented can certainly say whatever she wants, and I truly mean that.

But what I want, at least for my evenings out at the folk fests, is the gene that clearly everyone else at those events has—the leftwing folk artist/ folk music appreciation gene combined.

I only got half; I appreciate folk music, and yet, am not left wing. These two things are clearly completely incompatible, so I’m looking into genetic testing so that no one else in the future will have to suffer as I do.

So. I’m sorry to have missed the debate, and that is why I did. I hope to catch it on film at some point, in particular because I gather the pro-choice side was quite good. (I already know Stephanie Gray is good.)

Perhaps you had noticed. I find it hard to resist sharing Stone Soup with our PWPL readers. It’s so… real. Not a fairy tale, no supermoms here, just normal folks in normal-life situations, trying to do their best. And not always managing… But hey, that’s life too. Did I mention I was a big fan?