Masters of life

When a 65 year old woman became pregnant and carried the pregnancy in her own womb, it made headlines. The doctors had pumped in hormones in to that woman to prime her uterus and make it younger to be able to accept and carry the gestation. The ovum was fertilized in vitro and then implanted in the uterus. And finally she delivered a healthy young boy. It was all success for the doctors and propaganda for the clinic. They had just defeated the rules of nature and become powerful masters of life and death.

The picture of the mother and child occupied the centre pages of most of the magazines for many months.

Last year, while giving bath , the child just slipped in to the shallow basin of water and was drowned to death. The mother was attending a telephone call. That news also made head lines.

I have seen many such miracles happen at the hands of doctors, but all the years of efforts and success simply wiped clean by a clean sweep in seconds.

It was the sad death of the only child of a friend of mine which prompted me to these thoughts. The lady is soon passing the age of pregnancy, and the child was the result of all kinds of medical advancements. Being a doctor couple, they had used all their resources and professional contacts to get advanced fertility treatments. The child died of an obscure illness last week.

Being a doctor myself, I am likely to get ridiculed when I look suspiciously at the many weird things the present day doctors attempt to do. Advancements in fertilization techniques have given a godly aura to some of the gynecologists. When they think they are able to do something, they start believing they can do every thing. That they are masters of birth and death.

There was a time when couples who had problems to conceive by natural methods would accept it as a matter of destiny, or for those who believe in God, as His choice. Times have changed.

God said "I will make man in My image". Now the human race believes that they can take this prerogative of God and not only make, but design men and women to the image of what they think man should be. With that facility they think they can create people, and therefore they think that they can destroy them as well. And that is happening right in front of our eyes. It is time we realize they have very limited ability to create human life. They only have a limited ability to provide the circumstances under which that life will be created by God, but still they take credit for him. I can see eyebrows rising when I talk about God and creation, still. In fact, the best humans can do is to use nature’s laws of creation by putting together egg and sperm or by cutting the cord that maintains physical life with its creator.

Man's earliest desire of wanting to know has made it possible for him to understand certain things and take pride in them. He then believes he can be like God. He hopes for the supreme power over life and death. And this desire was the reason why we were pushed out of paradise. We are getting impatient and restless with the knowledge we have acquired. And that impatience is leading to all the troubles of the modern world.

“Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise; because of impatience we cannot return.”