Also, medicine is being transformed from a healing and palliating profession, to one that increasingly includes enabling lifestyle choices. This is bad for medicine, in my view, because it deprofessionalizes it and turns it into a technocratic and on-demand endeavor.

The proud parents will probably tell the baby how much they love him but not how they selected him.

And Eliot, they may very well wonder at the sense of sorrow that follows them and their child. I have a friend who lost one twin in utero unintenionally. It was devastating to her and the surviving child has always missed her sister.

What we call science and medicine understands little of the mystery of conception and birth as it contiues to be reduced to a bio-mechanical disease–a health problem that needs to be managed, cured if possible.

However, the essence of those works is and always has been in our prayers, and celebrations, the Holy Tradition that constitutes the life of the Church depspite the external situtation. It is to that we need to look and rely on.

I was clumsily trying to point out that while the witness of the RCC is valuable and welcome, we don’t need to rely on it. Our own resources are far greater than theirs and despite the persecutions have never gone away. The license and the tempations of secular/scientistic modernity seem to pose a far greater threat to understanding and living our faith than the oppression.

why six embryos (two split and became twins) were implanted in the first place.

The chance that a single embryo survive is quite small. They choose to implant more than one and eliminate the “extra” surviving ones. Th procedure is called single embryo elimination using ultrasound lead heart puncture.
I heard the story of a nurse who quit her job when she realized what was going on.

The proud parents will probably tell the baby how much they love him but not how they selected him.

I’m not challenging you here, just trying to draw the proper distinctions.

Yes, the Catholic Church does draw on what has always been taught (although from the Orthodox point of view, we also bring criticisms to it). But this is why much of it is valuable. I was listening to EWTN radio in the car last night, and much of what was said about invitro fertilization was solidly Orthodox.

Roger, the Catholics have done better thinking on these issues than the Orthodox

I disagree. Perhaps Catholics have a better recent history of articulating the truth and faithfully witnessing to the truth of human life and we have. Pope John Paul’s Theology of the Body has some really good insights. However, the RC think is only built on the what the Church has always know and taught, prayed and celebrated even in the midst of oppression. It is only with ‘freedom’ that we have lost our way.

It seems as if the majority of our bishops choose the path of worldly acquiesence or despotic tyranny longing for the ‘old country’. Since we have few who ‘rightly divide the word of truth’, a greater burden is placed upon us to discover, recover, live and articulate the reality the Church reveals to us. Personally I think that is the spirit of you work with AOI, is it not?

Another area of concern in this area is buying eggs from college students, often for eugenic purposes of trying to assure the birth of a child who will be physically beautiful or one with high intelligence. Hyper ovulation, which over stimulates the ovaries so that the body produces 10-20 eggs a cycle rather than the usual one, can lead to very dire side effects, ranging from infertility, infection, stroke, even death. If human cloning is perfected, countless more eggs will be required to move the technology forward, perhaps opening the door to paying poor women in the West and destitute women from very poor countries to endanger themselves for the benefit of brave new world agenda items.

We are in very real danger of turning some people into mere instrumentalities, which Kant decried and is certainly against the teaching of the Orthodox Church.

On another topic, parents who experience difficulty in conceiving a child have recourse through special prayers. They work.

Yes they do! My son proves it. As my priest told me, Mary seems to take special delight in such requests.

This would have been a unique opportunity for Bishop Savas and Office to do some educating on when human life begins and when human rights begin. However, there were no statements, articles, press releases on this subject. The GOA youth email did not cover the subject and the weekly GOA email did not either.

Can the new director of the Office of Church and Society answer the question “When do Human Beings Get Human Rights?”

Is the Office of Church and Society for Real or is the hard earned money of Greek Orthodox Christians simply paying for a Bishop to Blog and talk about video games?

It does not seem quite right … destroying life for a a better life? Are some lives are more important than others… Playing God? This is a dangerous game! Stem cell research is presented as a something that is truly necessary. It is necessary but not for what is quoted above.

When Darwin “discovered” that God does not exist many were exceedingly glad : everything is permitted, let us have fun of this or the other variety! “Have fun!” became a greeting.

After living like this something unexpected happened. More than ever before, people started to get depressed. They do not realize why, they do not know that they are longing for God.

Why live if there is nothing after death? How to live if I know that after we dye we won’t ever again see the peole we love: parents, children, friends, spouses? These sensibile people sink into depression and great suffering. Got to promise something to them! What about a long life, maybe a never ending life here on Earth? Truly Satanic!

This makes me think of what Christ said:

But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye shut the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye enter not in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering in to enter. (Matthew 23:13)

Fr. John Schroedel, the author of the post above is one such Orthodox scholar. He is a Ph.D. candidate in Bioethics. You will be hearing more from him in the future. You might also appreciate the work of H. Tristam Englehardt, also Orthodox.

On another topic, parents who experience difficulty in conceiving a child have recourse through special prayers. They work.