Government Stakes Claim To Every Newborn's DNA
Bob Unruh
Posted: April 03, 2008
An Orwellian plan that has state and federal governments staking claim to the ownership of every newborn's DNA in perpetuity is advancing under the radar of most privacy rights activists, but would turn the United States' citizenry into a huge pool of subjects for involuntary scientific experimentation, according to one organization alarmed over the issue.
"We now are considered guinea pigs, as opposed to human beings with rights," Twila Brase, president of the the Citizens' Council on Health Care, a Minnesota-based organization familiar with the progress in that state.
She warned ultimately, such DNA databases could spark the next wave of demands for eugenics, the concept of improving the human race through the control of various inherited traits. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, advocated eugenics to cull people she considered unfit from the population.
In 1921, she said eugenics is "the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems," and she later lamented "the ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all."
Lawmakers in Minnesota recently endorsed a proposal that would exempt stockpiles of DNA information already collected from every newborn from any sort of consent requirements. That means researchers could utilize the DNA of more than 780,000 Minnesota children for any sort of research project whatsover, Brase said.
"The Senate just voted to strip citizens of parental rights, privacy rights, patient rights and DNA property rights. They voted to make every citizen a research subject of the state government, starting at birth," she said. "They voted to let the government create genetic profiles of every citizen without their consent."
The result will be that every newborn's DNA will be collected at birth, "warehoused in a state genomic biobank, and given away to genetic researchers without parent consent – or in adulthood, without the individual's consent. Already, the health department reports that 42, 210 children have been subjected to genetic research without their consent," Brase told WND.
She said although her organization works with Minnesota issues, similar laws or rules and regulations already are in use across the nation.
The National Conference of State Legislatures, in fact, lists for all 50 states as well as the District of Columbia the various statutes or regulatory provisions under which newborns' DNA is being collected.
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