So, today in class, my psychology teacher posed some interesting questions:
1. Do you think genetic screening, used to identify whether expectant parents are likely to produce offspring predisposed to genetic diseases/birth defects, should be mandatory for couples who want to have children?
2. Consider that some couples pay large amounts of money to engineer the sex of their child. This raises the concern that, in the future, people will be able to and will want to control the genetic makeup of babies before they are even concieved. If you had a choice, would you want to choose your child's physical and emotional traits through genetic engineering?
I thought they were interesting questions and i think you, the intellectual crowd you are, might enjoy debating them. So, enjoy.
4 comments:
Ari
1) This strikes me as the sort of legal question probably best handled by Fern, but if I had to guess, I would say that there are some privacy issues involved. What gives me special pause is the word "mandatory," which I would think would be the likely point of attack for anyone who disagreed with genetic screening in general. There was a related debate--which can be found in The Atlantic's archives--about mandatory AIDS testing, which might shed some light on this one.
2) Fortunately, the technology that would make this question a pressing issue is very far off. Secondly, I want to say that genetic engineering will only allow for certain predispositions in emotional life, and will not be able to entirely predetermine the character of a baby any more than the random exchange process between chromosomes whose name escapes me at the moment (Michael: meiosis 2?).
Presuming the technology is available however, a number of questions arise. These in no particular order:
At a certain point of genetic tampering, one must wonder, however, what makes that baby _your_ baby: that you "designed" him/her with various traits?
The Devil's Advocate Response: If it were possible to so design a baby, then we've learned something about ourselves as humans: namely, that we are and have always been simply as malleable as our constituent mollecules. In which case, things like free will, to paraphrase Joyce (who said it, ironically, of paternity), is a legal fiction. In which--further--case "you're" not designing your children, but a predisposed but random arrangement of molecules that have equipt "you" with certain preferences that inexorably lead to the designing of a new, slightly less random collection of molecules.
Last thing I want to say about this: take the case of China. Since the Chinese instituted the "one-baby" rule to curb population growth, they've run into another problem. Chinese culture generally values boys rather than girls, such that families would abort their girls and keep their boys. This resulted in a population in which there were something like 400 million more males than females. Wife-stealing became common, as did roving bands of gangs, and all other sorts of unseemly social activity assoicated with the Y chromosome. The point of this example is to show that individual choices can lead to collectively undesirable situation, and that this ought to be the sort of warning label that ought to come on genetic screening. Genetic randomness has actually served us quite well thusfar, doesn't seem like something worth discarding for cosmetic reasons.
1-I don't think the testing should be mandatory, but rather an option for prospective parents who suspect they may have a serious genetic disease/disorder.
2-I would not want to choose my child's physical and emotional traits. I like the random way the chromosomes were combined to form the unique individuals that are my children. Even if you could choose, there is no guarantee that your choices would yield the results that you hoped for.
If it was as simple as removing a certain genetic coding (gene or altered chromosome) and it turn knowing that your offspring would be able to live cancer free that would be a good thing, however, doesn't it seem that when "we" mess with nature, we are asking for trouble?!
1) As Ryan suspected, I think under the current understanding of medical privacy, forcing parents to submit to tests before attempting to conceive children, and then presumably telling some parents that they are not allowed to procreate together (because their genetic backgrounds present a high probability that they would have disabled or sick children) would most likely be deemed unconstitutional.
2) No. First, I think the idea of designer babies is morally repulsive. It reeks of the sort of thing the Nazi's dreamed about. Second, it makes baby-making into something so sterile and contrived and unnatural. Third, humanity developed our current biological makeup over millions of years, I don't think it would be wise to go mucking around in our dna. And finally, I think it will bring about socially undesirable results. Can you imagine the disparity between the rich and poor if the rich are able to manufacture super-children and poor people are stuck doing things the way G-d intended? Can you imagine all the new forms of bigotry people would dream up? We'd have to pass laws protecting non-genetically engineered people's right to equal access in the workplace, and that would just be the tip of the ice burg.
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