Designer Babies: A Right to Choose?
By Brandon Keim
March 09, 2009
When a Los Angeles fertility clinic offered last month to let parents choose their kids’ hair and eye color, public outrage followed. On March 2, the clinic shut the program down — and that, says transhumanist author James Hughes, is a shame.
According to Hughes, using reproductive technologies — in this case, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), in which doctors screen embryos before implanting them — for cosmetic purposes is just an old-fashioned parental impulse, translated into 21st century technology.
If nobody gets hurt and everybody has access, says Hughes, then genetic modification is perfectly fine, and restricting it is an assault on reproductive freedom. “It’s in the same category as abortion. If you think women have the right to control their own bodies, then they should be able to make this choice,” he said. “There should be no law restricting the kind of kids people have, unless there’s gross evidence that they’re going to harm that kid, or harm society.”
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Wired.com: But isn’t this going to produce a super-race of children born to people wealthy enough to afford artificial reproduction?
Hughes: Insofar as the choices are eye color and hair color, that’s not going to exacerbate inequalities in society. It’s a minor way in which greater wealth allows more reproductive choice, but it shouldn’t be a reason to override reproductive freedom.
If PGD had the ability to double the IQs of children — which it doesn’t — then that would be the sort of inequality that warranted a social policy against it. I’m worried about that situation, not hair and eye color.
Gross exacerbation of social inequality is a grave social harm. That’s why we need universal health care, and universal access to any technology which provides profound enablement.
Wired.com: It’s hard to imagine these ever being universally available.
Hughes: Medicaid has considered the provision of fertility services. Some say fertility isn’t a health issue — but I think that’s B.S. Having a saline breast implant put in after a mastectomy isn’t a health issue, but we pay for it, because it improves quality of life.
Wired.com: Some ethicists say that non-therapeutic reproductive technologies shouldn’t be used until the industry is better-regulated.
Hughes: Fertility clinics and reproductive medicine need a complete revamping of their regulatory structures. Many of the procedures are not being monitored for safety and efficacy. But those are the only two grounds on which to base a legitimate societal regulation.
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