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Baby Shopping

 

The Clash of Worldviews in Bioethics

 

 

by Michael Poore

 

 

Designer babies! As the name implies, these babies are made to a certain specification—to have certain traits, but not others.

 

Some of these babies are produced for parents in search of a healthy baby—a baby without a genetic disease.

 

Other parents want a baby that has a disability—a baby with deafness or dwarfism, just like themselves.

 

Still others want a baby of a particular sex—a girl, please . . . no, we prefer a boy.

 

Yet other parents want to increase their chances of having a child with high intelligence, athletic ability, or physical beauty.

 

 

CRUDE ‘CHOICE’

 

Making designer babies is a crude business that seeks to allow only children with certain characteristics to be born. In some cases, sperm or egg donors are used to improve the chances of having a child with desired traits. In other cases, genetic screening is used to cull out embryos or babies with undesirable traits.

 

Like all businesses, the designer baby business is built on satisfying a variety of customer desires. It gives parents the ability—although a crude and limited ability—to choose their children in much the same way they shop for a computer.

 

Although it is part of the medical establishment, the goal of the designer baby project is not to make the sick or disabled well. Even when it aims at the birth of a healthy baby, it does not produce healthy babies by healing. Healthy babies are born simply because the unhealthy are eliminated: “Unhealthy” embryos are discarded in the lab, and “imperfect” babies are aborted in the womb.

 

Like the rest of the $3 billion-per-year fertility industry, the designer baby business is largely unregulated. It appears to be limited only by the current state of the technology, the desires of parents, their ability to pay, and the availability of a clinic willing to comply with their wishes.

 

And most clinics are willing to comply with about any request a customer makes. A recent survey of the fertility industry by Johns Hopkins University showed that, of the clinics offering embryo screening in conjunction with in vitro fertilization, 80 percent would do non-medical sex selection of embryos if requested by parents.

 

This means that they would select and implant embryos for no other reason than that the parents preferred one sex to the other, thus consigning embryos of the unwanted sex to destruction, either by disposal or in research. Remarkably, in 2005 these same clinics provided non-medical sex selection in 9 percent of the cases that used genetic screening in combination with in vitro fertilization.

 

Interestingly, this data on sex selection did not spark debate either in the mainstream media or among bloggers. Perhaps shopping for a baby of a specific sex has become an accepted practice following a short flurry of media commentary, including a Newsweek cover story, in early 2004.

 

The Hopkins study did, however, stimulate debate about the ethics of making crippled children. It found that 3 percent of the clinics surveyed had used genetic screening to enable parents to select an embryo “for the presence of a particular disease or disability . . . in order that the child would share that characteristic with the parents.”

 

 

JUST ‘LIKE US’

 

While the Hopkins survey may have triggered the recent skirmish in the biotech culture wars, the debate about disabled designer babies is not new. In early 2002 a Maryland couple announced the birth of their second child, a boy named Gauvin, whom they hoped would be deaf.

 

The couple’s justification for wanting a deaf baby? Their desire to “have a baby like us.” They are both deaf, and so is their 5-year-old daughter.

 

Having two deaf children was no coincidence for this deaf lesbian couple, Sharon Duchesneau and Candace McCullough. They had decided to use artificial insemination by a deaf donor, and they turned to a friend who is profoundly deaf and from a family with five generations of deafness.

 

For Duchesneau and McCullough, having a baby like themselves is more than simply having a baby who cannot hear. They do not consider deafness a disability. It is a normal part of their culture and not a medical condition to be fixed.

 

As members of Deaf culture, with a capital D, they see deafness as a cultural identity. It is a minority culture that establishes its identity around the use of American Sign Language, its own language. So, for Duchesneau and McCullough, having deaf children is about having children that belong to their own minority culture. In more personal terms, it is about having a baby that can “enjoy what we enjoy.”

 

A baby that can “enjoy what we enjoy.” “A deaf baby would be a special blessing.” Having a deaf child “would be a wonderful experience.” Such comments are a prominent theme of the extensive 2002 Washington Post Magazine account of Gauvin McCullough’s birth.

 

Of course, all parents hope to share a significant portion of their lives—their beliefs, pleasures, and interests—with their children. But there is something perverse in wanting a child that is limited to the enjoyment of what the parents can enjoy. Their logic: If we can’t hear Mozart, we can be better parents to a child that cannot hear Mozart, either.

 

But if their child were blind, Duchesneau and McCullough would probably try to have that fixed. “I want to be the same as my child,” said Candace McCullough. Consequently, Gauvin was denied a hearing aid that, if used at a very young age, could possibly help develop some hearing in one ear.

 

For Duchesneau and McCullough, there is the added sad perversity of being a lesbian couple. By nature, the two of them cannot reproduce. So, a sperm donor had to be found to father the children they wanted, children who will grow up knowing who their father is but without his being present to be their father. Not only have they crippled their children physically, they have also crippled them socially, emotionally, and spiritually.

 

 

WILLFUL DESIRES

 

All of this is rather self-centered, even narcissistic. And from this self-centeredness flows a host of major moral and ethical issues—issues common to the entire designer baby project. What are the responsibilities and obligations of parenting? Where do these duties come from? Do parents have a right to a baby, even a certain kind of baby? Are children to be viewed as gifts, or as projects? How does making designer babies alter the parent-child relationship? In sum, what is the meaning of love? Is proper parental love conditional to some quality standard achieved in the child?

 

How these issues are resolved is, for countless embryos in the lab and babies in the womb, a matter of life or death.

 

In the designer baby project, ethical decisions flow from a therapeutic worldview that says individuals are free from external moral authority and that personal feelings are the only proper source of individual choice. When it comes to making babies, the argument runs like this: Since our society permits unlimited reproductive freedom—whether or not to have children, when to have them, with whom to have them, and how many children to have—prospective parents should also be able to choose some of their children’s characteristics.

 

This radical view of freedom has been described as “anti-culture” by sociologist Philip Rieff. The anti-culture mindset rejects any sacred or natural order that sets limits or gives direction to social arrangements. Thus, for the designer baby project, the issue is not about right and wrong. Rather, it is whether this or that technique will produce a child with the desired characteristics. Morality gives way to utility since the primary concern of anti-culture is how to achieve individual desires.

 

As the designer baby project amply illustrates, the spirit of anti-culture is ultimately anti-human. It rejects children who do not match parental desires. Only the Christian message of love—of one’s neighbor (Mark 12:31), of the weak (James 1:27), of God and His created order (Deuteronomy 6:5-9)—is powerful enough to counter the distorted desires of the designer baby project. Love enables us to accept all children as unique and unrepeatable human beings. It envisions people, not projects. It liberates us to accept possibilities beyond our desires, even beyond our imaginations. Love enables sacrifice, even great sacrifice, without regard for loveliness and desirability. It is the embodiment of the very nature of God Himself.

 

 

Michael Poore is Executive Director of The Humanitas Project: A Center for Bioethics Education (www.humanitas.org), located in Cookeville, Tenn. As director of The Humanitas Project, he writes and speaks on a wide variety of topics relating to bioethics and biotechnology, as well as on issues related to Christian discipleship in a post-Christian culture.

 

 

 

From BreakPoint Worldview Magazine, April, 2007, reprinted with permission of Prison Fellowship, P.O. Box 1550, Merrifield, VA 22116, www.breakpoint.org.

 

 

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