Lori Andrews is an internationally recognized bioethicist and law professor who appears in FROZEN ANGELS. Andrews has acted as adviser on genetic and reproductive technology to institutions including Congress, the World Health Organization and the National Institutes of Health, as well as foreign nations including the emirate of Dubai and the French National Assembly.
In the following essay, Andrews shares her opinion on the ethical implications of reproductive technologies, and considers how scientific advances—like cloning and genetic manipulation—will affect society in the future.
Brave New Babies
An opinion piece by Lori Andrews
Americans increasingly approach procreation with a shopping-list mentality. Each year, 60,000 births occur through donor insemination, with many people choosing their future babies according to the hair color, hobbies, SAT scores, height (for men) and weight (for women) of the donors. An ad in a Stanford University newspaper offered $100,000 for an egg donor with “proven college-level athletic ability.”
Some parents abort girl fetuses because they want a boy. In one study, 12 percent of parents said they would abort a fetus with a genetic predisposition to obesity. In California, a court suggested that a disabled child could sue her parents for not aborting her.1
Imagine the lawsuits! A daughter might sue her folks for not making her prettier by paying for a “better” egg donor—or for not using genetic enhancement to make her smarter.
As technology evolves, parents-to-be will have even more control over the traits of their offspring. Scientists have already put human cancer genes in mice and firefly genes in tobacco plants, causing them to glow in the dark. Now, genetic engineering is being proposed for human embryos. Where might that lead?
In a Louis Harris poll sponsored by the March of Dimes, 43 percent of respondents said they approve of changing the makeup of human cells to improve babies’ physical characteristics; 42 percent approved upgrading children intellectually. Another survey found that more than one third of people would like to genetically control their child’s sexual preference.
The designing of children is occurring subtly as a result of individual choices through an open market. Thousands of couples turn to the Internet to find genetic parents for their future children. Parents-to-be view pictures of sperm and egg donors, listen to tapes of donors’ voices and review pages of descriptions of their physical features, their hobbies, their SAT scores and their philosophic viewpoints. At one Web site, couples bid on the eggs of attractive models. Can purchasing single genes—rather than a person’s whole packet—be far behind?
How are we, as a society, going to judge such desires? Should certain genetic manipulations be allowed and others not? Should parents be able to buy height-enhancing genes for their embryos? Will that be viewed more like cheating in sports or more like signing your child up for private tennis lessons? Is genetically protecting a child against a deadly disease appropriate but manipulating genes for cosmetic purposes not? Should parents be permitted to give their infants genes for traits that humans have never had before, like the ability to run at the speed of a cheetah? Would it be ethical to clone a human being? And if the designer babies did not turn out the way the parents had planned, should lemon laws for children allow them to get their money back?
How will parents feel if they pay for “smart” sperm, and "E=mc2" isn’t the first thing out of their child’s mouth? Already, one couple sued a sperm bank when the babies weren’t as handsome as they had wanted.
People need to take a close look at the technologies and work to regulate them. Right now, some of the proposed technologies will put the resulting children at great risk. In animal research, one-third of the cloned animals died shortly before or shortly after birth. Genetic interventions on embryos can lead to cancers and sterility. And, even if it were possible to scientifically perfect techniques such as cloning and genetic enhancements, the cost of the technologies—from $300,000 to over $1 million—would make them accessible only to the rich. If wealthy individuals genetically enhance their children to be smarter or taller, other people would feel pressured to do the same, just to allow their kids to keep up. “Normality” today may be “disability” tomorrow. The children of the poor would fall even further behind.
Ours is going to be the generation that writes the laws to govern these technologies. Will we be living among cloned human beings? Watch sports played by genetically enhanced athletes? Build special hospitals for the children who suffer harm as scientists iron out the problems in the experiments that are needed to apply these techniques to humans? FROZEN ANGELS offers a glimpse into our genetic future. Viewers should consider whether we are creating a society that we wouldn’t want to inhabit.
Lori Andrews, Distinguished Professor of Law at Chicago-Kent College of Law, is the author of a new genetics thriller, Sequence (St. Martins Press, June 2006), which she wrote to let the public at large know what goes on behind closed lab doors.
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1 In at least four states, beginning with a 1982 California trial involving a child born deaf, juries have gone so far as to accept a claim for something called "wrongful life." Here, the disabled child himself sues, through his parents. The alleged tort, in such a case, is life per se. The plaintiff newborn argues, essentially, that he has been denied a right to be aborted—that his undesired life is less valuable to him than nonexistence would be. And the jury, speaking for state and society, agrees that this is a reasonable conclusion.
Source: “Eugenics Then and Now” by David Tell, for the Editors, The Weekly Standard, September 15, 1997
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