Designer Babies and the Pro-Choice Movement
By Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow
Summer 2007

OVER THE LAST century, the link between sex and reproduction has weakened. Feminist activism, aided by technological advances, has given middle-class women in the United States widespread access to effective contraception and safe, legal abortion. Although far too many exceptions persist, for large numbers of women, sex today has no necessary relationship to childbearing. Meanwhile, a burgeoning fertility industry has, for thousands, taken baby-making from the bedroom to the laboratory.

In vitro fertilization (IVF) does not merely help the infertile to procreate; increasingly, it allows parents to determine the genetic makeup of their offspring. Initially, preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) targeted severe childhood diseases, such as Tay-Sachs and sickle cell anemia. Now, more parents use it to screen out genes for late-onset, treatable diseases, such as colon cancer; sex selection is also popular. According to a 2006 survey conducted by the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University, 42 percent of 137 IVF-PGD clinics allowed parents to select for gender. Scientists predict that parents will be able to choose such characteristics as blue eyes or curly hair. Less certain, but plausible, is that scientists will be able to identify genes for more complex traits, such as intelligence and homosexuality. Genetic engineering, which will enable not merely the selection but the insertion of desired genes, is on the horizon. In the United States, this rapidly advancing technology is unchecked by any regulatory mechanism.

It will emerge as an important political issue, complicated by competing values, such as individual liberty and social equality. Nowhere will this tension be more conspicuous than in the reproductive rights movement. There is a lot of messy overlap between reproductive rights and what could emerge as a neo-eugenics: both benefit from the separation of sex and reproduction and both entail increased “choice.” Pro-choice advocates already find themselves associated with advocates of this “reprogenetic” technology, who often appropriate pro-choice language. “It’s about Reproductive Rights, Stupid,” reads the title of an article on the Web site betterhumans.com, which promotes the use of biotechnologies to improve the human species.

Even without the borrowed buzzwords, the pro-choice movement would be uneasily close to the issue. Historically, pro-choice arguments have focused on the right to privacy and freedom from government interference. Legally, those are the terms that define reproductive rights. The landmark Supreme Court cases Connecticut v. Griswold (1965) and Roe v. Wade (1973) recognized the right of individuals to control their reproductive destinies. Legal scholars predict that when the question of selecting the traits of offspring inevitably arrives in court, it will be considered in this framework.

Like it or not, pro-choice groups, then, will be compelled to take a stand. They will have to distinguish their concept of reproductive rights from that advanced by neo-eugenicists and to decide whether and how to endorse regulation of reproductive technologies without jeopardizing already tenuous rights. But along with these challenges come opportunities. By incorporating concerns about the abuse of reproductive technologies into a pro-choice platform, the movement can shift away from an individual-liberties paradigm toward a social justice orientation; move away from a single-issue focus on abortion toward a more comprehensive agenda; and form coalitions with other segments of the left.

The Twentieth Century
The link between reproductive rights and eugenics is not new; in fact, it has dogged the movement since its early days. Margaret Sanger, the tireless pioneer of birth control in the United States, started out in the early twentieth century as a radical socialist and feminist. A nurse with working-class origins, she saw firsthand the travails of poor women drained physically and financially by endless births. Sanger believed that birth control—legally restricted at the time—was all but a panacea for society’s ills. She launched a crusade, even subordinating other values to the cause: during World War I, for example, she kept quiet about her pacifist beliefs out of fear that her unpopular opinion would undermine support for birth control.


More at: http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=861

I think making the connection with 'Eugenics' is a kind of scare tactic since nobody is advocating forced sterilization.
Humans have always chosen the genetic patterns of their offspring by choosing the genetic patterns of their sexual partners. It's just more deliberate and more precise now.
We're also breeding certain kinds of groups out of existence. When whites married whites and blacks married blacks, we continued relatively clear skin color lines. With interracial marriage we are slowly breeding whites and blacks out of existence. How much different is that than deliberate genetic choice of offspring?
Do we want anyone telling us that despite the fact that our partner is pregnant with a fetus with only a brain stem, we can't abort because it is impermissible to make a deliberate choice to end a pregnancy on the grounds of genetic predilections?
I'm only familar with a small group of 'designer babies', the ones produced by the Oneida community. All the reports I have read of that group of children report that they had good lives and no complaints about being 'designed.'

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A couple of movies that delve into the above topics come to mind. Gattaca and Idiocracy. They take somewhat of a different approach.

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Wouldn't you agree that the concept and dictionary definition of eugenics encompasses far more than forced sterilization?

Scariest part to me is that the pace of the research exceeds our current ability to legislate and rationalize it. Before we can ask "Should we...", we are already at "so that's what that does..."

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Natural philosophers quit asking that question about 600 years ago resulting in the Renaissance. Releasing the mind and will of man is dangerous -- just ask any religion. Human nature is fundamentally flawed in that view and to keep it in check requires submission to God's holy word.

I agree with you that the pace of change has far outpaced our ethical and biological ability to control it. A brief reading of the Bible or the story of Gilgamesh or of the Iliad reveals that man has changed not at all in the past 3K-4K years. Our technological ability outpaces natural selection. I can't think it will end well.

Bot

I think we've changed substantially as humans in the past 3-4k years. We've evolved the idea of property, we've developed democracies and abandoned monarchies and aristocracies, we've developed ideas of universal human rights, we've refined our processes of scientific investigation etc.
I agree the dictionary definition is broader but there is emotional baggage to the word that seems to distract from clear discussion.

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1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

Those are social constructs and change with the whims of culture. The biblical Patriarchs, if transported to Peshawar, would fit in after maybe a half-hour of sign language. It might take them a couple more days to get a job as a cabbie in NYC.

I agree these are social changes but I don't think they are a matter of whim. The changes occur partly (largely?) as a result of things like population growth, need for more calories from better farming etc. For instance, if on a whim we decided to return to being hunter gatherers, most of the population would starve to death. Abraham might fit in Peshawar but his social system wouldn't develop universities, hospitals etc. Pakistan would never have developed nuclear weapons if the sum total of their cultural institutions were rooted in patriarchal tribal culture. They needed the universities, education and democracy of the West to do it. Old Abe might be capable of being a taxi driver but he couldn't be a university president, a hospital administrator or a CEO.

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1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

Pol Pot.

I think the connection to abortion is a bit forced.

You can't close Pandora's Box once it's open. If people can do something, they will.

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^^^ Sure you can. It happens all the time in human history. Behavior on the individual or mass-scale is malleable. It just takes the will and the force.

If couples/women can pick the sex of their child, and allow only the ones they want to go to term, I suspect that a majority of the time they'll elect to have a boy.

Now what happens? A surfeit of male babies. Females become more valuable due to scarcity; males are surplus; their value (assuming a technological society with no heavy labor and little war) drops. Those other two Horsemen, Supply and Demand, ride again.

In one of his SF novels, the late James Blish postulated this as a scenario for the future -- men, barely existing as welfare drones; women, the elite of society. Though it seems we're heading in that direction already, with all the male-bashing that goes on in the media and society.

My point (and I'm all in favor of abortion, of not preserving undesirable traits, and of not rewarding stupid behaviors like overbreeding) is that we have to consider the economics of letting genies out of bottles before we pull the cork, not after.
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Example?

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Hey this has already happened in China. Now there is such a shortage of girls being raised there (as opposed to being adopted by Americans) that if you have a girl you can write your own ticket as the parents of boys ply you with gifts and cash for the privilege of marrying her to their little prince. It is now common for girls to get engaged at birth as the parents of boys swoop in to catch her before she is betrothed to another boy.


As far as Eugenics goes, I am all for the ability of parents to try and produce the best offspring possible. it is the promise that Darwin gave us of survival of the fittest. Humans kind of do that already in our mating rituals. However, we as a species have been holding ourselves back. Of course I don't believe in forced sterilizations, but if people who have the money and ability to try and improved upon the genetic stock they should be allowed to do so. In time we could eliminate most inherited diseases that way and who knows, maybe come up with a smarter, longer lived, stronger,etc. individual as well. We must not be afraid of the future.


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