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.


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