At least two terrible consequences are the foreseen price of these manipulations and their "justifications." They are as follows:
a) The first is that the medical profession in its entirety is more and more subjected to pressures that will transform doctors insidiously into artisans of death. Workers of death, which is already what innumerable gynecologists are becoming who practice abortion and participate in campaigns of contraception. It is already what surgeons are becoming who perform sterilizations, and already what internists, anesthetists and cancer specialists are producing when they practice euthanasia. Work of death; the genetic manipulators are already implicated in this more and more.
In brief, the culture of death is about to cause an appreciable part of the medical profession to topple over into the camp of the enemies of life. If the medical world -- and with it, the infirmaries and all the health workers -- does not recover, if it does not withdraw from this bewitching spiral, suspicion will affect the whole medical profession; the most precious capital of the profession -- confidence -- will be definitively ruined. Deprived of all effective legal protection, the weakest of human beings -- all categories confused -- will also be deprived of all reliable medical aid.
b) The second consequence is, however, the most dramatic imaginable. Because the culture of death underlies them, genetic manipulations and the laws pretending to lend their support, result not only in the destruction of life, but also in the destruction of love and the family, and the foyer of both.
Here we find an anti-family tradition renewed that goes back all the way to Frederick Engels. The logic of these manipulations is, in effect, very simple, and its "lordly" character is going to appear yet again. The deep motivation from which emanates the will to manipulate can be expressed in these terms: "I am strong enough, powerful enough, not to need anyone else to be myself. I don't have, then, any reason to run the risk of discovering that I am poor -- either in the eyes of others or on my own. Why, then, should I risk the adventure of loving and being loved? All true love that I might show to others or which I might experience from others would be an unbearable mark of weakness and poverty, the supreme sign of my finiteness -- exactly what I want to reject and deny. And so, since I have given myself the power, I will dispose of others to my liking or fashion them to my convenience, according to the criteria of quality that is appropriate to me and the usefulness that I define."
Thus we have the spiraling chain with which the culture of death binds human society.
Before such a challenge, the like of which has no precedent in history, there is only one response: welcome joyously the daily experience of our poverty, for it, if accepted, becomes the anchorage for our hope. Paradoxically, it is on this condition that we are able to love and open ourselves to love, to welcome and be welcomed. This is the price of our being able to rediscover the very thing that seems to create such fear in many of our contemporaries: tenderness.
Briefly, rather than the culture of death, why not risk the culture of life?
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