New Definition of Conception?

Silly me thought the term "conception" was defined by the moment the sperm enters the egg and their DNA fuse together like a zipper.

Fortunately, I have sources like BBC News to clarify such misconceptions. In an article on what purports to be the first baby born without the BRCA1 gene that almost invariably leads to adult breast cancer, the BBC defines conception as follows:

Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) involves taking a cell from an embryo at the eight-cell stage of development, when it is around three-days old, and testing it.

This is before conception - defined as when the embryo is implanted in the womb.

Doctors then select an embryo free from rogue genes to continue the pregnancy, and discard any whose genetic profile points to future problems.

I was cornfused enough when I heard that pregnancy was technically defined as only beginning at the moment of implantation in the womb (thus allowing people to say that a woman was never pregnant if she uses an abortificeant to destroy the embryo before it implants). But now, apparently, the technical definitions of conception and pregnancy are the same thing.

The article also seems to drastically over-simplify the arguments of those who are concerned about this kind of "therapy":

Josephine Quintavalle, of the campaign group Comment on Reproductive Ethics, said: "This is nothing personal towards the girl, but I think we have gone too far.

"Underlying all this is eugenics."

Mrs Quintavalle said the message was that "you are better off dead, than being born with this gene".

What the article doesn't explain is that the typical medical procedure to weed out this kind of gene is in vitro fertilization, and that the typical form of in vitro fertilization involves taking a number of embryos, testing their DNA and then only selecting the ones with the desirable traits for implantation (or "conception" according to this article). That means that all of the other embryos, even the viable ones that have nothing else "wrong" with them other than the undesired genes (whether it be for breast cancer, brown hair, or two X-chromosomes), and destroying them -- also defined as killing embryonic humans.

That detail becomes quite muddled when the author of the article suggests that the gene was screened before conception, which somehow suggests that the unfertilized egg and...uhm...free ranging sperm (?) were both tested before being allowed to fuse.

In all likelihood, this so-called miracle baby was born at the expense of a number of her syblings who were deemed not fit to continue living due to the cost, expense, and pain they were likely to experience as a result of their genes.

What I find most perplexing is that so many people who have chosen abortions carry the pain of extinguishing a single life for the rest of their time on earth, yet couples who have chosen in vitro fertilization and extinguished dozens of lives don't seem to carry that much baggage in public. It's as if chosing to have the one baby over all of the others allows them some kind of psychological fire escape...

Heck, my sister and I still get in fights over things I was allowed to do in high school that she wasn't...I can't imagine the kind of anxiety it would cause if my parents didn't even allow her to be born...

I think I just developed the plot for The Unborn 2: In Vitro Decimation.

Comments

[Peter Terp]

For the record,

MedicineNet.com defines conception as follows:

Conception: 1. The union of the sperm and the ovum. Synonymous with fertilization.
2. The onset of pregnancy, marked by implantation of the blastocyst into the endometrium.
3. A basic understanding of a situation or a principle.
From the Latin conceptio, conceptionis meaning conception, becoming pregnant; drawing up of legal formulae; and from the Latin conceptus meaning conceiving, pregnancy; collecting, or a collection.

So apparently, conception's first definition is the union of egg and sperm, and only secondarily means "implantation."