Science, Religion, and Film: Steel Magnolias

This is not the post I had planned to write for today, but I was watching Steel Magnolias last night and thinking about it in the context of the conversation around genetic engineering and in vitro fertilization and cloning. Movies that touch on our uneasiness where manipulating nature is concerned abound-- Jurassic Park is always my go-to. The cloning of the dinosaurs and the manipulation of their DNA is frivolous, superfluous. "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should." It's Frankenstein again, it's the concern that creating life is the bridge that we should not cross because we can't do it right.

But dinosaurs and monsters aren't the current debate. They're the distant future concern but they're not the current debate. The current debate has a concern for people, real people trying to conceive or thinking about the consequences of any given conception. As a speaker said in a talk I went to last night, speaking about having a child, "Everyone has the right to try." That's different from the right to conceive, or the right to bear a child to term, or the right to remain a parent.

There's a hornet's nest there that I don't want to poke today, but its existence is exactly why I think Steel Magnolias is important. This is a story about a community whose lives are permanently affected by a pregnancy that's not medically recommended. It is real and down to earth and shows us the wants and desires that go into the choice to become a parent. It shows us the heart behind the debate, makes us ask ourselves what we would do in that circumstance. "I would rather have thirty minutes of wonderful than a lifetime of nothing special."

Especially in light of mother's day this past Sunday, we can have a whole conversation about what it means to be a parent. I suspect that everyone would agree that you can be a parent without having your own biological children, that there is a real and current need for people to step into that role for children whose biological parents have left the picture. In a sense, the debate around in vitro fertilization is doubly frustrating, a discussion the morals of creating children while ignoring the children that are. But looking ahead while leaving past consequences behind is something humanity always does, something we are always doing, and so it is a discussion that must be had, especially as the technology we have makes us ask how far we can go.

Steel Magnolias is a human story and it does not do to divorce humanity from science. As we think about scientific discovery and medical technology, it's important to keep the broader human story in mind, to acknowledge the joys and pains that can be created or addressed by what we do. This movie is a crystallization of one set of joy and pain, a side set of feelings forever in my mind whenever a double-helix is unwound in front of me or a pipette punctures a cell.