Analysis of Jodi Picoult´s My Sister's Keeper

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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...

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...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.

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