A Brave New World in Naperville?

There is a proposal to build a fertility clinic at Washington and Benton in Naperville. The proposed facility touches close to home for us. We’ve been trying to conceive for 29 months.

Not long ago, we were told by one specialist that if we ever wanted to become pregnant, we’d have to use in vitro fertilization. We know the pain and heartache that bring people to a fertility clinic like the one being proposed. We assume that couples going to such a clinic have the best of intentions, and we judge the hearts of no one who has taken this path.

But we strongly oppose the proposed clinic based on serious ethical concerns. The proposed facility is not ethically neutral; this is not the same as bringing in a family restaurant, a clothing store, or an optometrist.

Some of the procedures associated with the proposed facility promote an understanding of the human person that undermines fundamental human rights and dignity.

Procedures like in vitro fertilization reduce children to the product of a technological process. A child becomes a manufactured commodity, produced in a relationship of domination, subject to quality control, manipulation and even disposal.

We desperately want a child. But our desires, even for something so good, do not justify bringing that about by any means whatsoever.

This is not simply a question of zoning and planning. It is consenting to a particular worldview for the people of Naperville — a worldview in which a child is not procreated, but manufactured.

With any number of beneficial things that could be built on this site, why bring into our community something carrying with it these ethical issues? Why invite into our downtown Aldous Huxley’s vision of a Brave New World in which children are not so much born as they are decanted?

Mike and Mary Beth

Brummond

Naperville

Spend money on education, COD

The March 19 article about the childish squabble between the board of trustees at the College of DuPage and the village of Glen Ellyn was just appalling. Have they really spent $500,000 of my tax dollars on legal fees?

I think the board of trustees of the College of DuPage needs to grow up and do the job we elected them to do. It took months of lawyer’s fees and a judge’s order to get them to work out their differences with the village. Even a DuPage County Board member is quoted as saying he would “see how much taxpayer money was wasted on this.”

And now they can’t seem to work out a deal with their own teachers. Worst of all, they have used my tax dollars to post the details of this little spat on the college’s Web page.

I want my education taxes spent on education, not on legal fees and silly Web pages.

Bob Caron

Glen Ellyn

Daylight savings time an issue?

The change to daylight saving time brought a tsunami of reports blaming the change for heart attacks, workplace accidents and traffic crashes.

Maybe the perils of daylight saving can become another inane campaign issue, like the contraception debate that the opposition successfully “slicked” the Republican candidates into taking on.

Brian DeWolf

Batavia