With the rapid growth and changing social attitudes towards LGBT communities, more and more of us are deciding to create nuclear families of our own. This has led to the increasing possibilities of creating different types of family structures. You could have a baby with two dads, two mothers, three dads or no mother. We can adopt black babies, Chinese babies, mixed or white ones. Our nuclear family can consist of an array of different races, genders and creeds.
But what if you could design your own baby? Would you make it have green eyes? Maybe you could genetically programme it to like math, enjoy the arts or appreciate jazz. This may seem like science fiction but for those with money there is a real possibility that these ‘designer babies’ are just 5 years away in the making.
For those who are religious, they would see it as us, playing God. The only problem with this argument is that we already play God in a whole range of ways in people’s lives. Science has made it possible to abort foetuses, remove cancerous ovaries, to repair damaged nerve tissue or birth defects, we don’t complain when science corrects disabilities yet we are uncomfortable when it wants to impose.
We have a paradoxical view about science and medicine. It is there to stop things happening it is not there to create things. Once science starts creating, the end result may be something that Aldous Huxley would be able to relate too.
According to [Savulescu, 2002] the idea of removing genetic material in foetus’ to some is just as damaging an idea as imposing new genetic material. Some people cannot understand why someone would choose to have a disabled child. With all the stigma, isolation and limited life choices faced by children with disabilities, surely its better to make sure your baby at least has the best start in life by screening for any possible hereditary illnesses:
“A deaf lesbian couple in the United States have deliberately created a deaf child. Sharon Duchesneau and Candy McCullough used their own sperm donor, a deaf friend with five generations of deafness in his family. Like others in the deaf community, Duchesneau and McCullough don’t see deafness as a disability.”
One could argue these parents did not subscribe to the orthodox view of ‘normality’. To them it was normal to have a deaf child. Deafness was part of their culture, it is a unique linguistic tool by which there family and culture communicates.
Although, many would see allowing nature to take its course as one thing, but to deliberately produce deaf babies, when you had the knowledge and power to change it as a gross manifestation of the designer concept.
I have to admit I am troubled by the idea of parents who would do this, and yet as a disabled man I recognise that I am glad my parents did not abort me, or leave me for adoption. Indeed I am testament to the incredibly rich and happy lives disabled people can and do lead. Would I want to remain disabled? Yes, would I want a disabled child? That’s a different matter.
Instinctively, I feel that parents should set out the best life chances for their children. Society, already screens for cystic fibrosis, Down’s syndrome and Huntington’s disease as well as many others.
Disabilities are on a very wide spectrum. Babies with the genetic material to likely develop obesity versus a baby with the genetic material to have leukaemia and be dead aged 9. One is a disability that can be managed and reversed; the other is a sad and painful journey of blood transfusions, operations, and a slow and painful death. And yet, there is joy, beauty and happiness to be had from even the shortest and painful of lives.
If all humans are equal, then surely we must value all life chances as equally valued.
Once we get into the area of value judgements, I fear it would lead us into eugenics, Nazism view of perfection. Just as plastic surgery was invented by the Germans during the First World War to help treat badly injured soldiers. By the Second World War, it became an instrument for eugenics by which they could alter the bodies of disabled, Romany children and use them as specimens for genetic research. And now plastic surgery has become a preserve of the rich by which they enhance their genetics.
In conclusion I fear we would begin by screening out diseases, but if the option came, parents would begin to input higher IQs, better language skills, their children to be faster runners and so on. As is so often the case, this option to selectively breed your child would be for the rich. We would quickly become a world where the poor are not just poor, but also genetically weak, it would be a very scary world to live in.
Private sector companies are lining up to charge us billions of pounds to give us designer babies. The law and public opinion is still decidedly conscious of the affect that could reverberate if we was allowed to pick and choose our offspring and yet the instinctive desire to produce and nurture your own child, a child free of illness, a child you knew could survive to be 150, who is intelligent and generous is a powerful mechanism in changing the law. How much is your child worth? That answer may be as easy as looking at your bank statement.
