Happy Thanksgiving. As this is the most American of holidays, it is fitting that its meaning should evolve and take on different significance for each passing generation. Where settlers once gave thanks for the sustaining gifts of the harvest, Americans in later years paused to celebrate freedom from want in this much-blessed land and later still we used Thanksgiving as an opportunity to gather far-flung relations together again at the family homestead.
Today, many of us commemorate Thanksgiving by fortifying our bodies with carbohydrates so we may endure a three-day ordeal of shopping which will commence at 10 a.m. tomorrow. I’m going to give in to that; I’m going to acknowledge the hegemony Christmas swings over the head of Thanksgiving in the hierarchy of holidays. I could, and possibly should, launch into a dirge about the commercialization of Christmas and inveigh against all the cash we’ll spend in the next five weeks. But I’m not going to do that. I just want to give your Christmas shopping a little nudge and this is it: I’m going to ask you not to shop at “Toys R Us.”
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Operators Are Standing By
When I was in college, I was once unable to be present during the registration period and asked my roommate to do it for me. It was for that reason that I spent the spring semester of 1981 studying Bioethics in Public Policy. It did nothing toward satisfying the requirements for my degree, but after the first week of class, I was intrigued by the subject and decided to stick it out. I think I got a “B.” In class, we talked about legalizing suicide, Karen Ann Quinlan, eugenics and human experimentation.
It was the first year of the Reagan administration and while it is perhaps difficult to think of those days as a more innocent time, we had not yet heard of AIDS, Baby M, Jack Kervorkian or designer embryos. The most recent of those trends, designer embryos, jumped at me from the front page of the Sunday New York Times a few weeks ago. Here’s how it works: a woman who cannot produce fertile eggs of her own pays a fertile woman to allow herself to be pumped full of hormones and produce an extraordinary number of eggs. Some of these eggs are used to impregnate the infertile woman. Because this is an imprecise technology, there is frequently a surplus of fertile eggs. These fertile human eggs are the hottest item to hit the commodities market since pork bellies. The eggs, however, are perishable. For reasons beyond my comprehension, human eggs cannot be easily frozen, but human embryos can. So the eggs are fertilized with sperm from various men and the embryos are placed in a freezer and onto the markets, where they can be purchased for slightly less then $3,000 by people who’ve had their name on a waiting list for quite some time.
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