Huxleian World
To the Editors:
In all fairness to Gilbert and Lesley Brown, let's stop treating their new baby daughter as a medical oddity. Like every child ever conceived and born, the so-called test-tube baby [July 31] spent about nine months in utero and entered the world in a manner acceptable to society and medicine. Louise Brown was conceived in a Petri dish, not a test tube, and she developed and was born from within her natural mother's womb. To herald this girl as a test-tube baby only perpetuates the myth that we are entering a Huxleian world of callous indifference to childbirth and motherhood. It's a glorious day for women afflicted with the type of sterility Mrs. Brown has overcome.
Stuart Kunkler
Columbus
While Dr. Steptoe may be applauded in scientific circles for his work in helping Mrs. Brown achieve pregnancy and normal delivery, his performing multiple abortions—that is, destroying pregnancy and life—takes much of the glamour from his achievement.
James T. Murphy, M.D.
La Crosse, Wis.
Your writer detected irony in the fact that Drs. Steptoe and Edwards financed the research that culminated in the birth of the first test-tube baby by doing legal abortions. In fact, the two activities spring from the same basic belief: that parenthood should be a matter of choice.
Margaret Wood
Milan, N.H.
By turning the birth of their child into a media event, the Browns have most probably guaranteed that their child, whom they so desperately wanted, will never have a chance at a normal childhood or even adulthood. They have degraded and institutionalized the child, and for that act, not for their act of medically assisted birth, the Browns should be viewed as symbols of the degeneration of Western morals.
Grant Parsons
Ann Arbor, Mich.
Cambodian Experiment
Hats off to David Aikman [July 31], who has the clarity of mind, the moral sense and the courage to expose the blind cruelty of Marxism when that atheistic, deterministic system runs its course unrestrained by Christian principles.
Allen Bowman
Marion, Ind.
Something is so grotesquely out of focus that I am in a state of awed disbelief. It is in the birth of one child and the slaughter of millions that an imbalance seems to make a mockery of humaneness.
Such a development of a child is of course newsworthy; but when we are told about the destruction of 1 million lives we turn the page and sigh, "They are at it again." No outrage, no days of prayer in churches, no outcries from protesters —nothing.
One child was awaited with great anticipation. Heaven's gates alone heard the stampeding of the million.
Ellen J. Marinucci
Houston
The statement that the situation in Cambodia is "the deadly logical consequence of an atheistic" system of values suggests that theistic value systems have never allowed or encouraged such atrocities. One need only cite the brutalities committed in the name of God, from the Inquisition to the "Kill a Commie for Christ" mentality, to demonstrate that intolerance, bigotry and cruelties of all kinds have been and continue to be more common to "religiously oriented" societies than to the few genuinely secular ones.
James Anding
Waterloo, Ont.