During her third summer of life, my oldest daughter had three broken bones – a broken arm in June, a broken tibia in July, and a broken femur in August. Leah has osteogenesis imperfecta (OI), a dominant genetic disorder that leads to brittle bones and other musculoskeletal problems. I have OI too, and any child of mine has a 50 percent chance of inheriting the disorder.
During that difficult summer, my husband and I were contemplating using preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) to conceive another child. We could test for my and Leah’s OI mutation, only select fertilized eggs that did not have the mutation, and thus guarantee a child with strong bones. And yet I was haunted that summer. I obsessed over ethical questions, many of them related to my Christian faith.
Read the full, original story here: Delicate Decisions
