Nudging the Discourse?
Popular Mechanics has an article in its January issue with a provocative title: "How to Create a Designer Baby." No, it's not in "How-To Central," along with bleeding your brakes or building a hardwood floor this weekend. Rather, it's a brief survey of ART options: savior siblings, sex selection, and the use of PGD to avoid certain heritable diseases.
The piece is framed disturbingly, with a graphic (partly pictured) listing traits such as "athleticism" and "resists addictive behavior" as well as "hair color and texture" and "skin color." It opens:
For just an extra few thousand dollars, women undergoing in vitro fertilization (IVF) could one day choose to have a baby boy with perfect vision, an aptitude for sports and a virtual lock on avoiding colon cancer.
This is worryingly reminiscent of Lee Silver's notorious 1999 piece in Time, which described the operation of a 2024 fertility clinic under the title "Can You Make My Kid Smarter?" (By then, he predicted, genes would have been identified that confer protection against "all major infectious and noninfectious diseases.")
But something interesting happens in the body of the Popular Mechanics piece: It notes the "firestorm of protest" that followed last year's attempt to offer screening for hair and skin color -- and the only quotes are ones of concern. It mentions the Pope's condemnation of "the obsessive search for the perfect child" and then quotes Elizabeth Ginsburg, a prominent researcher and practitioner, and former president of SART:
"The future of genetic screening will really depend on what people want. If that means creating so-called designer babies, we're going to need a lot more regulation."
That could be seen as a worrying new gambit: accept minor regulation in exchange for a license to push the boundaries of acceptability. (It's long seemed bizarre that the industry would not support a ban on reproductive cloning for just that reason, instead of opposing all restrictions.) But Ginsburg is well aware of the costs as well as the benefits of IVF. "I don't consider IVF to be a risk-free intervention," she once told Harvard Magazine, and as President of SART she was involved in efforts to make the process safer.
The most interesting thing about the comment, however, is that Popular Mechanics printed it. It's hard to picture caveats like this being included in a similar article ten years ago. The prevailing ethos then was a libertarian technophilia.
Is it too much to hope that the discourse has shifted slightly and the idea of regulation really is taking hold?
Previously on Biopolitical Times: