SUICIDAL Michelle Bica, the Ohio woman who killed a pregnant woman and ripped her baby alive from the womb, is rightly remembered as a monster.
Jack and Lisa Nash, who bred their new baby boy in a lab to be genetically desirable, are thought of as pioneers.
I’m more worried about what the Nashes did.
The Colorado couple came forward with news that they had conceived their 6-week-old son, Adam, in a test tube so that the stem cells taken from his umbilical cord blood might save Molly, their diseased daughter.
The case marks the first time a genetically engineered human being was brought into existence for a utilitarian purpose.
The Bica story is plainly a nightmare, with a woman wanting a child so desperately she was willing to butcher the mother and risk killing the unborn baby to get it.
Who doesn’t recoil in terror at the freakish result of this woman’s inability to control her desires?
The second is a dream come true – or so it must seem to couples who would like to use the same technology to have children free of genetic abnormalities, and maybe even save the lives of people already living.
The experiment that led to Baby Adam’s birth has been largely uncriticized, though it has dramatically hastened the day when our society exterminates those deemed unfit for life.
Oh, medical ethicists have pointed out that a serious line has been crossed here, now that it is seen as permissible to genetically engineer children to fit the parents’ desires – even when the characteristics of the child are designed not to benefit the child, but to benefit others.
“We wanted a healthy baby, and it doesn’t hurt [Adam] to save [his sister’s] life,” said the proud mom.
So that’s it: The ends justify the means, and everybody means well?
Well, what if the umbilical-cord procedure doesn’t work for Molly? Will that pitiful newborn have to yield his bones for marrow excavation, an incredibly painful procedure he cannot meaningfully consent to?
Also, now that it’s OK to have babies to cannibalize their bodies, how are we to stop people from doing this to provide a reservoir of organs for their own medical emergencies?
And on what grounds are we to say parents cannot genetically engineer their children to have blond hair and blue eyes, or to be thin, or smart, or any other characteristics society finds desirable?
They will frame their Frankenstein impulses as compassionate, as a way of “maximizing their child’s potential,” or some such rot. It will be accepted by Americans, who have made “choice” and “individual rights” their highest concern.
Meanwhile, those unborn children deemed unacceptable will be destroyed, and no one will bat an eye. It’s a slippery slope to euthanasia and infanticide.
When Lisa Nash was asked why she and her husband didn’t conceive a baby the natural way, and abort her if she proved genetically useless, Nash said, “I could not have done that.”
Excuse me, Mrs. Nash, but what do you call the destruction of 15 embryos in the lab before scientists found one – Adam – that could be implanted into your womb? There’s no moral difference between that and standard abortion.
Michelle Bica took one life to satisfy her desire for the perfect baby; the Nashes, arguably, took many more. And the cold-blooded eugenicist philosophy behind their experiment, if not stopped cold, will result in countless more in the future.
Who is the greater danger to humanity, one crazy killer or those fine folks who lead a quiet revolution overturning thousands of years of moral reasoning on what it means to be human?
Human beings are not a consumer product. They have dignity and value not for what they can do, but because of who they are.
We are forgetting that. The culture of death marches on.
E-mail: dreher@nypost.com