Morality In Brave New World

Imagine you have a son. A sweet baby boy, your smile, your partner’s eyes, a laugh of pure gold and a spirit as wild as a mustang. He is bright, loves to read and loves to follow his daddy. He is everything you could have ever asked for, every dream you’ve ever had appears in this young child. He runs at the park, tries to lick the dog, and will laugh to the point of tears at practically anything. Imagine this sweet boy that you love beyond anything in the world getting sick. Slowly, you watch as the light in his eye dwindles and that sparkle in his laugh turns dull. He hasn’t left that hospital bed in weeks, the first teddy bear he ever received lay by his side. The doctors say that they have tried everything. He is too young, too precious, this can’t be it, you can’t lose him, no not this early. Another doctor walks in. He states he may have a cure; stem cells.

There are many questions about the morality of taking stem cell from one person or embryo and using it to heal another person. “The answer depends, in part, on whether we believe the embryo has a soul or is a person; in essence, whether it is a human being” (Stem Cell Now 127). In Brave New World, they genetically engineer children, which in some way relates to stem cells. Children are engineered to not get diseases, and if they do they are thrown into a lower caste or put into the Park Lane Hospital for the Dying. The book creates a sense of mortification about how they “grow” the children, which in turn makes the modifications seem immoral. This is the same way the media makes stem cells seem like an extremely immoral act. One way to retrieve stem cells is to grow a blastocyst and take the cells from that organism. The debate is whether or not the blastocyst is a human or not. Although I understand this argument, there are alternative ways to recover stem cells, for example adults have stem cells that can be