A creepy-sounding outfit called the Fertility Institutes is offering parents the controversial chance to screen for blond-haired, blue-eyed, fair-skinned babies, and lots of people aren’t happy about it. For a fee, the Institutes promise to let you choose your baby’s features through “pre-implantation genetic diagnosis” — sort of implying that ugliness needs diagnosing. The L.A.-based clinic — which appears to be a private company despite its academic-sounding name — calls the process “cosmetic medicine.”
From the company’s “About” page:
For the first time ever, patients having genetic screening for abnormal chromosome conditions in their embryos will be able to elect expanded testing that can greatly increase the odds of achieving a healthy pregnancy with a preselected choice of gender, eye color, hair color and complexion, along with screening for potentially lethal diseases, screening for cancer tendencies (breast, colon, pancreas, prostate) and more.
Though I couldn’t dig up any prices for their services, they do apparently offer low monthly payments and interest rates “ranging from 1.9% - 23.9% APR” via CapitalOne, and have even teamed up with a local travel agency to help get discriminating parents to Los Angeles.
While the cosmetic screening is new — if not a new idea — the gender screening has been around for some time. Here’s a “scenario” from the Fertility Institutes’ website:
Mr. & Mrs. Adams (names are fictitious) present to our offices with a request for gender selection. The couple reports having successfully conceived and delivered three healthy females. The last birth was three years ago. Mr. Adams has a strong family history of girls being born, with his only brother having produced two girls, and three cousins also having had a total of seven female and one male offspring. […] They were rewarded with a twin pregnancy that resulted in the birth of two healthy, male infants. While we exist to provide high quality medical services, we very strictly adhere to guidelines that have a history of providing excellent outcome results. While we cannot “guarantee” a desired outcome to anyone, we can now come as close to a guarantee as science allows. With the IVF-PGD option, success rates approach 100%. […].
I can’t quite explain why, but I find this all a little disturbing. I’m very much pro-choice when it comes to abortion, on the grounds that in all cases, a woman has the right to decide whether or not an embryo ought to be growing inside of her. That position implies that the mom’s freedom not to have a baby overrides the embryo’s freedom to live. And that in turn comes from the idea that an embryo isn’t an actual person yet, but rather just a clump of cells and organic matter (see the image up top). But my problem is: why am I not bothered by the idea of discarding that ball of cells in an abortion, but at the same time quite disturbed by the idea of pre-determining its eye colour? The cosmetic stuff seems pretty harmless when compared with eliminating an embryo altogether, but for some reason I can’t put my finger on, it bothers me more.
There are certainly some clear differences here, and you can make many more convincing arguments for the social benefits of ending unwanted pregnancies than you can for genetically engineering babies to be cute. There are lots of valid reasons for choosing not to give birth, and tinkering with genes to eliminate freckles just seems… gratuitous… in comparison. Still, there’s a fundamental contradiction in there, and an uneasy question about how much tinkering is too much.
To learn more about the history of human artificial selection, check out this post from last May, which featured an excellent article on the history of eugenics, from the always fascinating Damn Interesting.
6 responses so far ↓
1 Rowena // Feb 26, 2009 at 1:00 pm
I think what’s creepy is the idea that these parents might have preconceived ideas of what their kid is supposed to be like- I mean, what if the selection process fails? Are the parents going to accept the kid or dump it and try for another perfect baby? Or treat it like dirt ‘cos it turned out wrong? Part of having a baby usually means having, or at least trying to have an open heart for whatever you get.
2 B // Feb 26, 2009 at 5:58 pm
Can the clinic give the children intelligent parents?
I’ll leave you with this gem:
“Beauty fades, but stupid is forever.”
3 Rawda // Feb 27, 2009 at 1:40 pm
Women choose to keep or abort their pregnancies only because mostly, babies influence their mothers’ lives and demand so much by becoming the main priority. Children are a life time commitment, the “#1″ commitment, and all parents’ personal desires and goals might have to be shelved until a later time. Again, this is a general rule, because for the most part, it’s the mother that stays with the child and raises it. Also, since it’s her body that houses the baby for 9 months.
However, deciding another human being’s gender and features to “create” an image that you prefer, makes one a moron and an asshole. I don’t know, maybe I’ll feel differently if one day I found out that my unborn child might have a disease that I can prevent by choosing some genes over others, but I hope that I’ll be strong and wise enough to wait for what is going to be the best thing in my life and love him/her as such.
4 Theo // Mar 1, 2009 at 11:26 am
I have an idea what creeps me out about this. It will make parents worse. Parenting is half raising a child and half getting to know her. If you can choose some of your child’s features, then there’s less surprise that you, as a parent, have to get to know. It will leave you ill-equipped to deal with every other surprise your child will have in store; for there will be more–life is (still) rich. The service also promotes a line of thinking in which your child’s problems can be sorted out by ensuring that she have a set of desirable features. It allows a parent to abdicate responsibility. My feeling is that if you don’t give parents these options, they won’t as easily cultivate the rather poor mindsets that may accompany them.
In short, it helps promote the view that your children exist at your convenience, and not you a theirs.
(NB: I have a harder time with genetic screening of spina bifida or Tay-Sachs syndrome because the prospect of avoiding horrible, horrible pain also has moral weight, and is just not the same thing as having boys vs. girls or a certain hair colour.)
This comes down to an innate conservatism of mine, which suggests that there are choices we simply should not have, because we aren’t ready for them. There is just so much that we limited humans cannot anticipate. When we raise children we can either choose to respect the complexity of nature and human life, admitting we don’t know everything; or we can think we have all the answers to our children’s future from day one, and we will always, always be proven wrong. To be presented with something that purports provide an a priori control, without effort and understanding, is to be given another opportunity to think–and, unprecedentedly, to physically change a child–as if you did, in fact, know all the answers.
I am OK with the choice to have an abortion but not OK with this choice, paradoxically because I think that embryos actually do have some moral standing as potential future children. Parents owe their children a decent job in raising them. Potential future parents owe potential future children a considered judgment about whether they (the parents) are able to take on this responsibility. At the very least, abortion is binary: it is either/or. Hence it allows adults to preserve and respect the complexity of children, not try to reduce that complexity. It is far, far more mature to choose to have an abortion that to pick your kid’s features.
5 Asher Vijay // Mar 1, 2009 at 5:53 pm
Gattaca much?
6 Rawda // Mar 1, 2009 at 7:56 pm
Theo, I am not OK with abortion either, but I totally understand and support the choice and the reasons behind it, or maybe because I’m a woman.
But I couldn’t have said this better myself, so thanks!
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