Redesigning Humans or Humanity?

by Catherine Glenn Foster, 1L
Law Weekly
April 1, 2009

This piece is the first of a multipart series on issues regarding human genetic manipulation and designer babies.

“Redesigning humans … that’s really what we’re about to embark upon.” – Dr. Gregory Stock, UCLA School of Medicine

On Tuesday, Mar. 24, the Progressive Alliance for Life, of which I am a board member, screened the award-winning film Frozen Angels, which has been featured on PBS’s Independent Lens and was an official selection at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, Visions du Réel in Nyon, and Hot Docs in Toronto, among others.

Frozen Angels is a scientific and social exploration of the future of human reproductive technology. Through interviews with a sperm bank director/post-mortem sperm retriever, an expectant surrogate mother, a gene designer, grown-up designer babies, and others, this film explores the booming business of buying and selling DNA and the moral, ethical, and legal dilemmas of this new frontier. Though there are more issues at play here than I could possibly hope to address within the constraints of an op-ed (or two), I’d like to touch on a couple of the most prominent.

“No one really has the guts to say it, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn’t we? … We have begun to play God in so many intimate realms of life that we could not turn back if we tried.” – Dr. Gregory Stock
One of the stated goals of human reproductive technology is eugenic in nature, including both the improvement of human abilities and the decrease of disease. In either case, dangerous precedents are set, and sexism, class division, and discrimination against the disabled are very real possibilities. Whether the issue is reproductive technologies, genetic manipulation, or cloning, such scientific endeavors (also, notably, including so-called “designer babies,” hybrids, and stem cell research) implicate numerous ethical issues.

Egg/sperm/embryo selection and selective abortion fall into the realm of reproductive technology and are likely to lead to numerous forms of discrimination. Parents who pick traits for their children, for example, negate the child’s voice and preferences. Athletic ability may not translate into athletic desire, and a bookworm who was picked for throwing ability may experience psychological ramifications that we haven’t yet mapped.

Doron Blake, a young man interviewed in Frozen Angels, is a grown-up “designer baby”, the result of his mother’s visit to the Repository for Germinal Choice (the so-called, now-defunct, “Nobel Prize Sperm Bank,” originally intended to house the sperm of Nobel Prize winners in order to improve the world’s “germ plasm” and fight against the “dilution of intelligence” and “retrograde humans”).

He has said, “Most of being a prodigy was negative. People have always been saying 'prodigy sperm child' all my life. But I am not that wonderful at anything. You feel a lot of pressure because you don't want to let people down, or you don't really feel free to be what you want to be. I don't feel safe with people I don't know, and I don't feel very confident with others. That may be the effect of having things expected of me.” He adds, “I don’t think you can breed … good people.”

Prenatal sex determination already results in sex-selective abortion in places such as rural central China; modern technology is reinforcing the government’s legislated sexism. Even in less authoritative regimes, innate sexism can play a role, in addition to the underlying bioethics of choosing a child’s gender. Likewise, class division looms on the horizon.

Frozen Angels reports that most couples of all races and backgrounds seek egg “donation” (I will overlook, here, the ethics of commercializing egg donation, or any commercialization of human tissue) look for a blond-haired, blue-eyed mother. Many such couples come from outside the U.S., often from third-world countries; Lori Andrews, Distinguished Professor of Law at Chicago-Kent College of Law, calls this the “new [American] imperialism.”

The parents often believe that their child’s influx of American DNA will bring him or her certain advantages. Sadly, this is certainly not always the case. Angela Pacheco, a mixed-race foster child featured in Frozen Angels, spoke of class distinctions and of her dissociation from both the Latino and white communities.

Athletic ability is valued in egg donors, as well; intelligence is less valued by most. Conversely, intelligence seems more valuable in sperm donors; there is the Repository for women who want to ensure that their children’s biological fathers are relatively intelligent.

Though this Cadillac of sperm banks shut its doors after the founder’s death, the idea lives on in the Heredity Choice sperm bank, run by a former employee of the Repository. It is not such a wild idea that an initial division of the species could come about: the “haves” who are able to pay for an extra twenty years of life, for example, or immunity to the common cold, versus the “have-nots”, likely those persons of low social standing already living in poverty, who could be subject to even further discrimination and abuse.

The abuse is not limited to these people. In her response to Frozen Angels, Lori Andrews cited some scary statistics: one study reported that 12% of parents “would abort a fetus with a genetic predisposition to obesity.” In a Louis Harris poll sponsored by the March of Dimes, more than 40% of respondents approved of genetic manipulation or other means to “improve babies’ physical characteristics” or intelligence.

Over one-third of people surveyed in another study would “genetically control their child’s sexual preference.” A California court has already suggested that a disabled child can sue her parents for failing to abort her, possibly opening the door for suits by children who don’t think they’re pretty or smart enough.

Will there be “lemon laws” for children who aren’t up to standard? One couple has already sued a sperm bank when the babies weren’t the desired level of attractiveness. Far more important, in my opinion, is the devastating psychological damage the parents inflicted on the children through the lawsuit and the root feelings that caused it.

In 2006, Paul Billings, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California and Chair of the Council for Responsible Genetics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, analyzed Proposition 71 (California’s Stem Cell Research and Cures Act): “If the new laws result in one woman shunning screening, or the avoidable birth of a severely disabled child, the state and its people will be the losers.”

Comment on Reproductive Ethics (CORE) responded: “CORE reiterates its opinion that the new genetics is too often simply old eugenics with new white coats and better expertise. Discrimination against the disabled has never been more virulent.”

Commentators have expressed concern about discrimination and/or stigmatization that could result for those forced to undergo genetic testing because of their racial, ethnic, or geographic origin, and for traditional negative eugenics groups such as the mentally ill, the unintelligent, homosexuals, and criminals – not to mention new groups that could be subject to possible discrimination, such as brunettes or those who are short or overweight. If the “Wild West” of human reproductive technology is not the subject of regulation soon, we could be headed for a real-life Gattaca.

Finally, this “your way, right away,” commercial, profit-driven approach to the most intimate and (theoretically) least selective of human relationships necessarily detracts from these relationships and, in fact, from ourselves. We as a species are hardly growing and advancing when we are becoming more closed-minded than ever, acting as if we are unable to love or care for a disabled child –- whether that disability is a disease or the “disease” of red, brown, or black hair. It is not always altruism that leads parents to select the “perfect” child; it is the result of a culture that, though seemingly obsessed with death, shields itself from age and suffering and is willing to euthanize non-terminal patients. An industry that supports such discrimination can hardly be viewed as admirable.