If you have to choose between these two, “said Tijs van den Brink – his index fingers fluttered to two sides. “Where are you then?” Clinical embryologist Edith Coonen dropped a short silence. On her left side, Bert van Share, director of the controversial gender clinic (for couples who want to determine for themselves if they get a boy or girl). He had just quoted JD Vance and reported that the EU is “a total dictatorship.”
Stef Groenewoud, special appointment of Ethics of care at the Theological University of Utrecht, was on her right side. Quite apart from gender selection, he raised questions about “selecting an embryo” – a procedure that is used, for example, to prevent certain hereditary diseases from being transferred.
And between those two people of mening, Coonen was allowed to choose.
The trio was on Saturday This is Tijs (EO) because of findings from the EO Podcast The Koningswensabout the ideal of manufacturability around children. The podcast makers had 52 midwives filled in a survey, of whom fifteen said they had experienced a pregnancy “to” the gender of the child “. In the podcast, a board member of the Dutch Society of Abortion doctors also spoke, who emphasized that it was a marginal phenomenon and that the reason for an abortion should not matter. But Van den Brink climbed in the pen.
How could it be that the podcast did not start a social debate, he mused in an EO column. That was “probably declared by the sensitivity of the abortion debate in our country.” Yet it seemed to him “of great importance that the debate about this is going”. Van den Brink has been thinking for a while – the New light-Episode from 2019 about whether abortion demonstrations are ‘intimidation or assistance’ is still fresh in the memory with this viewer. And now the debate had to get a new push in the back by putting an embryologist between a JD Vance fan and an embryo selection skeptic.
Competition
The positive downside of this sad affair was that I finally experienced a zap weekend again WNL on Sunday not the most remarkable TV moments. Favorable news for me, the reader and presenter Rick Nieman, I just have the idea. The competition was also a murderous, because on Sunday the new survival program also went on RTL 4 The Summit Starts. In it, a group of participants, wrapped and packed with a lot of money, had to reach the top of a mountain within twelve days. They should move “along scary ridges and frightening gorges,” warned presenter Beau van Erven Dorens. It was also involved that the participants were dependent on each other: as well as one member of the group that did not reach Deadline of twelve days, nobody received money. And of course there were also occasions to eliminate fellow players and take each other’s money.
More is not necessary to heat people against each other. Within a few hours the common enemy was determined: the talking Wanda. Part of the group decided that she had to leave the game. Wanda only found out when she stood in the middle of a shockingly high rope bridge and a fellow candidate suddenly hit one of the ropes under her with an ax. Exit Wanda. A debate about the cruelty of Survival TV: I think that is useful.
But this weekend the viewer remained saddled with the ‘debate’ of Van den Brink. “I would say: I am the voice of reasonableness,” Coonen finally answered his question for whose view she would choose. Then she laughed her head, as if she had made a joke. The studio laughed. But it seemed like the fairest answer she could have given.