Test Tube Babies In Frankenstein

Test-tube babies and in vitro fertilization are damaging and unnatural forms of science. In the novel, Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, Victor Frankenstein is a damaged and obsessed scientist looking for a way to bring a corpse to life after the loss of his mother. He unknowingly creates a monster with strength greater than any normal human with the mind of a newborn baby. His carelessness with the creation of a mutant human and not showing compassion leads to it killing multiple people. Test tube babies’ lives are begun outside their mother’s body through a process called in vitro fertilization, and Mary Shelley describes a process similar to this with Frankenstein bestowing life to the creature without the traditional process of pregnancy or

While recounting the story of the creature to Robert Walton, Victor Frankenstein tells him, “I myself became capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter” (Shelley 53). Victor Frankenstein puts corpses’ body parts together to form a human being and brings it to life. Similarly, test tube babies are made by combining sperm and an egg and putting it inside a woman’s body to give it life. Describing the process undergone to bring the creature to life, Victor says, “I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet” (Shelley 58). Frankenstein uses science and recreates conception and childbirth in a laboratory without two humans procreating. Test tube babies are formed through an extremely similar process in a lab, with male gametes being injected into females. While admiring the successful parts of his creature, Frankenstein says, “His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful” (Shelley 58). Frankenstein chooses specific features for his monster to look the way he envisioned it. In the process of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, parents can see expected traits for their babies, and eventually, through genetic engineering, they will be able to decide their baby’s features for