Our friends at The Stream were kind enough to adapt some of what I’ve written here on Bill Nye, Oskar Schindler, and the notion of “extra people.” On the heels of this, Wesley Smith points out how “extra people,” literally — to be precise, extra embryos — are being turned into jewelry:
Illustrating the crassness of our age, a jewelry company implants leftover destroyed embryos into their products.
I thought this must surely be a joke. Not so. Wesley quotes an Australian parenting website, Kidspot:
After a six-year IVF journey to receive miracles Lachlan, 4, and 21-month-old twins Charlotte and William, Belinda and Shaun Stafford didn’t know what to do with their remaining embryos. Their babies.
Extra embryos. Extra babies. They go on:
Donation wasn’t an option, the annual storage fee was an added financial strain, and disposing of them unimaginable.
So when the NSW couple heard about Baby Bee Hummingbirds, an Australian company turning embryos into keepsake jewelry, they jumped at the chance.
Now Ms Stafford has all of her babies with her every day — including seven embryos in her heart-shaped pendant worn close to her heart, always.
You can see some of the “products” manufactured by Baby Bee Hummingbirds by clicking here. (The photo at the top of this post is an actual baby hummingbird, just so there is no confusion.)
The “crassness of our age”? Maybe so. But frankly, words fail me. I might say the ghoulishness, stemming from a failure to reckon with the fearful mystery of life.
Isn’t that what we talk about here every day? The choice, laid before us in the debate about biological origins, is between a science that fully recognizes that mystery, and one that airbrushes it with simplistic patter about how a marvel such as human life emerges, unwanted and unplanned, from blind, haphazard material processes.
If the latter is the case, why not customize your attire with spare babies? Good lord. I guess decorative jewelry is better than soap or lampshades.
Photo credit: Brandon Koch, via Flickr.