Analysis of Jodi Picoult´s My Sister's Keeper

823 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Life begins at conception essay

My Sister's Keeper, written by Jodi Picoult, is about a family struggling to save their daughter from leukemia. By the age of thirteen, Anna, “the savior sister”, has gone through countless surgeries, transfusions and other procedures to try to save her sister from the cancer she has fought since young childhood. Anna is now at an age where she is trying to find who she truly is. She no longer wants to be defined by her older sister, she wants to be her own person. In feeling this way, she makes the decision that could tear apart her family and may result in fatal consequences for the sister she loves. Jodi Picoult confronts the controversial topic of preimplantation genetics diagnosis and savior children in this captivating story of medicine, family, and morals. Preimplantation genetics diagnosis (PGD) is a procedure used before implantation of the embryo to help prevent defects in the embyro to be passed on to the child.(Preimplantation) In this book, PGD was used to make Anna's bone marrow a match for sister Katie, so Katie can receive tissues and organs that she needs to fight the cancer. PGD is controversial procedure because the embryos are modified and chosen instead of allowing nature to do it job. Scientist create several embryos, the ones with the right characteristics are used or stored while the ones that are not desired are thrown away. If the theory of life start at conception is true, then they are throwing away potential lives. A savior sibling is a genetically modified child that is conceived to help save a sibling who needs new tissues or organs. To harvest the tissues and organs, the donor has to go through varies level of pain and danger to have the material needed to help the receiver. Donors go through n...

... middle of paper ...

...ily to Sara but they all somehow revolve around Katie. Sara can not separate them from Katie's physical well being. Even with Katie, Sara is so focused on her daughter's well being that she does not acknowledge Katie's emotional health. Sara had no knowledge that her daughter Katie had come to term with dying and was ready to end the suffering that they all had gone through. It took all of them going to trial against one another for the emotions and the thoughts to be seen and heard. Sara was so afraid of losing Katie she focused solely on medical statistics than being there to talk to her daughter and listen to what her daughter was going through.

Works Cited

"Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (Embryo Screening)."University of Pennsylvania Health System. Penn Medicine, Web. 15 Nov. 2013.

Picoult, Jodi. My Sister's Keeper: A Novel. New York: Atria, 2004. Print.

Show More
Related

  • Bread Givers Book 3 Essay

    818 Words  | 2 Pages

    Sara feels horrible that she didn’t come to see her mother and spend more time with her. She knows that she should’ve come to see her mother instead of investing so much time in school. Then, her mother died a couple of days later. She decides to stay and visit her father, Reb Smolinsky, often but doesn’t visit him after he gets married again only thirty days after her mother died. A couple months later, she sees Reb again, but he’s working.

    Read More

  • The Pros And Cons Of Beefalo

    709 Words  | 2 Pages

    Usage of genetic modification to pick and chose features and personality traits of embryos could conceivably occur in future times. Wealthy individuals could essentially purchase a baby with built-in genetic advantages (Simmons). Ethically, these seem immoral. Playing God and taking control over the natural way of life makes some understandably uneasy. Ultimately, religious and moral standpoints should play a role in the future of genetic engineering, but not control it. Genetic engineering’s advantages far outweigh the cost of a genetically formulated baby and

    Read More

  • Why I Live at the P.O.

    1171 Words  | 3 Pages

    middle of paper ... ... It is clear to the reader that Sister is hoping that Stella-Rondo will come for her in hopes of giving her the attention she is longing for. Throughout the story, it has been Sister who has tried to persuade the reader to take her side in the debacle with her family. The truth is that it was Sister who caused the entire dispute that is going on with her obsession to compete with her sister that goes back to her childhood where she feels that Stella-Rondo is spoiled and continues to be spoiled up to the end following Sister’s desperate need for attention.

    Read More

  • GATTACA

    1224 Words  | 3 Pages

    However, with genetic engineering this miracle of like is taken and reduced to petty “character creation” picking and choosing what someone else thinks should “make them special”. An unborn child that undergoes genetic treatments in this fashion is known as a designer baby (“Should Parents Be Permitted to Select the Gender of Their Children?”). By picking and choosing the traits of a child these designer babies bear similarities to abortion, choosing to get rid of the original child in favor of a “better” one. It is also unfair to deprive a child of their own life. By removing the element of chance and imputing their own preferences, children become treated more as an extension of their parents than as living beings with their own unique life. Parents could redirect a child’s entire life by imposing their wishes before they are even born, choosing a cookie cutter tall, athletic boy over a girl with her own individual traits, or any other choice that would redirect a child’s

    Read More

  • Designer Babies: Disease Free or New Child

    937 Words  | 2 Pages

    After the discovery of genetically altering an embryo before implantation, “designer babies” was coined to describe a child genetically altered “to ensure specific intellectual and cosmetic characteristics.” (“Designer Babies” n.p.). This procedure combines genetic engineering and In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) to make sure certain characteristics are absent or present in an embryo (Thadani n.p.). The procedure also includes taking an embryo to be pre-implementation genetically diagnosed (PGD), another procedure that doctors use to screen the embryos (Stock n.p.). An embryo’s DNA goes through multiple tests to obtain an analysis of the embryo, which will list all the components of the embryo including genetic disorders and physical traits such as Down syndrome, blue eyes, and brown hair, for instance (Smith 7). Although the use of PGD is widely accepted by the “reproductive medical community” and the modifying of disorders or diseases is to a degree, once the characteristics are no longer health related “72% disapprove of the procedure” (“Designer Babies” n.p.). At this point the parents make decisions that would alter their child’s life forever and this decision is rather controversial in the U...

    Read More

  • Designer Babies: What is Ethical?

    992 Words  | 2 Pages

    People should not have access to genetically altering their children because of people’s views on God and their faith, the ethics involving humans, and the possible dangers in tampering with human genes. Although it is many parent’s dream to have the perfect child, or to create a child just the way they want, parents need to realize the reality in genetic engineering. Sometimes a dream should stay a figment of one’s imagination, so reality can go in without the chance of harming an innocent child’s life.

    Read More

  • Designer Babies

    650 Words  | 2 Pages

    In today’s advanced world, modern technology has enabled humans to accomplish tasks once thought to be purely science fiction. We live in a world today where everything is instant and custom designed. Who would have ever thought that one day parents would be able to design their children? Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) is a “process [that] involves taking a 3day old embryo and pulling one of its six cells to test for genetic markers of disease.” (Edmonds0. Although this process is meant to help discover harmful diseases or complications like cancer, the idea of parents using this process to give their children what they consider “ideal traits” co0mes into question. Even though parents have a right to do what they think is best for their children, parents should not be allowed to genetically engineer their children because it can create new social and economic distinctions as well as destroy the idea that everyone is created equal no matter their differences.

    Read More

  • Reasons for Having Children: Savior Siblings

    1413 Words  | 3 Pages

    I believe that parents are not morally justified in having a child merely to provide life saving medical treatment to another child or family member, but that this does not mean that the creation of savior siblings is morally impermissible. By having a child solely to provide life saving medical treatment, you are treating this child merely as a means rather than an end to the individual child. By having the child solely as a means to save another, you are violating this savior sibling in that you are treating them as a source of spare parts that can be used by the sickly child in order to solely promote the prolonged life of the currently sick child. This view that having a child merely as a way to provide medical treatment does not consider the multitude of other avenues that this newborn child can take, and presupposes that the child will only be used for the single purpose of providing life saving medical treatment through use of stems cells or organ donation. What this view fails to consider is that these savior siblings are valued by families for so much more than just as a human bag of good cells and organs that can be used to save the life of the original child. Instead, these savior siblings can be valued as normal children themselves, in that they can be valued in the same way that any other child who is born is valued, yet at the same time they will also be able to provide life-saving treatment to their sibling. My view runs parallel to the view held by Claudia Mills who argues that it is acceptable to have a savior sibling, yet at the same time we can not have a child for purely instrumental motives, and instead should more so value the child for the intrinsic worth that they have. Mills presents her argument by puttin...

    Read More

  • What is Eugenics?

    1713 Words  | 4 Pages

    Stephen Quake, Opening the Pandora’s box of prenatal genetic testing. Nature Medicine. 17, 250-251 (2011).

    Read More

  • Ethics And Medicine: The Role Of Ethics In Medicine

    1675 Words  | 4 Pages

    Today, the use of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) to create a donor transplant stem cells can be compelling and also misguided for an older sibling suffering from a genetic disorder. In Lisa Belkin 's essay "The Made-to-Order Savior," parents of six years old, Molly Nash, decide to breed another child for the purpose of saving Molly from a Fanconi disease. Not only does Molly suffers from this disease but also she is in a condition where there exist two separate malformations in her heart. Fanconi anemia is the genetic disorder that leads to the failure of bone marrow production. In Lauren Slater 's essay "Who Holds the Clicker," the advancement of a surgical procedure known as deep brain syndrome (DBS) assisted Mario Della Grotta in overcoming an Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Many medical procedures present ethical challenges in today 's society by implementing the advancement of medical technologies, which negatively affects the community

    Read More

  • My Sister's Keeper

    1018 Words  | 3 Pages

    My Sister's Keeper is the story of Anna Fitzgerald, who by the age of thirteen has undergone many blood transfusions, numerous surgeries, and multiple bone marrow transplants. “Most babies are accidents, not me. I was engineered, born to save my sister’s life.” At the beginning of the movie Anna explains that she as conceived to be a donor for her sister, Kate. Kate is a 16 year old with renal failure due to a very rare form of leukemia. The girls' parents expect Anna to donate her kidney to help her sister. Instead of donating the kidney, Anna files a lawsuit against her parents for the rights of her own body so that she could not be forced into the surgery against her will. This causes mixed reactions between Anna’s parents, Brain and Sara.

    Read More

  • Genetic Engineering And The Ethics Of Genetic Engineering

    1809 Words  | 4 Pages

    The act of human cloning raises important socio-ethical implications in cases where cloning might change the shape of a family's structure by mixing the role of parenting within a family of complex relations. An example of this is when a female DNA donor would be the clone's genetic twin, rather than mother, complicating the genetic and social relationships between mother and child as well as the relationships between other family members and the clone. The ethical questions we need to ask in these situations, specifically one where a child is genetically bred to be a donor is whether doctors and parents producing another child are doing so exclusively in order to act as an organ donating factory, and also the moral question of how the child would feel about the process. Designer babies produced to save the lives or health of their siblings or parents would know that they have been brought into existence solely to satisfy a need and not out of love for their own existence. If the creation of these babies is allowed, it would seem like society views these new human beings as mere instruments for the good of others. This causes serious socio-political, economic, ethical and religious upheavals in societies that have only just began to realise and embrace the

    Read More

  • Triple Screen Testing Essay

    1875 Words  | 4 Pages

    New technology in noninvasive prenatal genetic screening tests has proven quite successful in determining the likelihood of a genetic malformation. These highly accurate tests “work by using a sample of cell-free fetal DNA circulating in the mother’s blood,” which can be collected as early as five to seven weeks into gestation “to detect chromoso...

    Read More

  • Creating a Designer Baby

    2208 Words  | 5 Pages

    Peterson-lyer, Karen. “The Limits Of Genetic Control.” Designer Children: Reconciling Genetic Technology, Ferinism, & Christian Faith. 170: Pilgrim Press, 2004. Points of View Reference Center. Web. 13 Nov. 2013.

    Read More

  • My Sister

    598 Words  | 2 Pages

    My sister is important to me in a numerous amount of ways. She has taught me to be truthful, kind and to never loose faith. Through her I’ve learned to have self-confidence in all that I do or I won’t limit to half of the things I am capable of. I am very thankful that she is a part of me because I know without her I wouldn’t be who I am today. She has helped mold me into the person I have become. I learn from her that making good choices is one of the most important things in life, no matter the situation. Every moment I have with ...

    Read More

More about Analysis of Jodi Picoult´s My Sister's Keeper

Open Document