Seeking “Healthy” Children: Nearing Gattaca?
September 14, 2006
You remember the movie Gattaca, starring Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, right? In the not-too-distant future, Vincent (Hawke) is born the old-fashioned way, free of genetic engineering. With his genes left to “chance,” Vincent is now saddled with not just bad eyesight but a serious heart condition that shrinks his life expectancy to 30 years. In Gattaca, where genetic composition is determinative, a profile like Vincent’s destines a person to permanent membership in the socioeconomic underclass.
Determined not to subject their second child to a similar fate, Marie and Antonio, Vincent’s parents, decide to conceive him in what has become the “natural” way – i.e., genetically fine-tuned.
Geneticist (Blair Underwood): Your extracted eggs, Marie, have been fertilized with Antonio’s sperm. After screening, we are left with two healthy boys and two very healthy girls. Naturally, no critical predispositions to any major inheritable diseases. All that remains is to select the most compatible candidate. First, we may as well decide on gender. Have you given it any thought?
Mom: We would want Vincent to have a brother, you know, to play with.
Geneticist: Of course you would. Hello, Vincent. . . . You have specified hazel eyes, dark hair and fair skin. . . . I’ve taken the liberty of eradicating any potentially prejudicial conditions: premature baldness, myopia, alcoholism and addictive susceptibility, propensity for violence, obesity, etc.
Mom: We didn’t want – I mean, diseases yes, but –
Dad: We were just wondering if it’s good to leave just a few things to chance?
Geneticist: You want to give your child the best possible start. Believe me, we have enough imperfection built in already. Your child doesn’t need any additional burdens. [Camera and Mom turn to look at Vincent.] Keep in mind this child is still you. Simply the best of you. You could conceive naturally a thousand times and never get such a result.
Notice what’s going on here: Marie and Antonio sincerely and compassionately desire to protect their offspring from predispositions to any major inheritable diseases. Technology is available to facilitate the quenching of that desire. But that technology requires that they conspire to create numerous embryos (“boys” and “girls”), all but one of which will be destroyed, frozen or used for research. The natural law “commands compassion and prohibits murder.” See J. Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know: A Guide 123 (2003) (discussing euthanasia). Gattaca morality, in contrast, justifies murder in the name of compassion.
Once Marie and Antonio have twisted compassion into a weapon against the rest of moral law, they find themselves slipping down the proverbial slope. They know there is something deeply wrong with allowing the geneticist to fine tune their second child into a super-boy, free of any undesirable genetic traits. “We didn’t want – I mean, diseases yes, but [not every single detail],” Mom tries to say. Yet, unable to find a good reason to reject the geneticist’s advice, they relent. Once you’ve begun to play God, deciding which offspring will live and which will die, it seems ridiculous not to use all the genetic information available to perfect your choice.When I first saw Gattaca eight years ago, I found the science fiction fairly entertaining but entirely unbelievable. Yet, this type of science is becoming less fiction and more reality. On September 3, the New York Times ran a front page article, Seeking Healthy Children, Couples Cull Embryos, discussing preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD, a procedure that “Prospective parents have been using . . . for more than a decade to screen for genes certain to cause childhood diseases that are severe and largely untreatable.”
Are we stumbling and sliding toward Gattaca? Today, in the name of compassion, parents are “culling embryos,” weeding out genetic misfits with “severe and largely untreatable” diseases.
In the future, many specialists believe, most in vitro fertilizations will be performed for fertile couples seeking genetic diagnosis, not as a treatment for infertility. . . .
Soon, experts say, prospective parents may be able to choose between an embryo that could become a child with a lower risk of colon cancer who is likely to be fat, or one who is likely to be thin but has a slightly elevated risk of Alzheimer’s, or a boy likely to be short with low cholesterol but a significant risk of Parkinson’s, or a girl likely to be tall with a moderate risk of diabetes.
Proponents of PGD say that confusing what is going on today with
the concept of ‘designer babies’ . . . is hurtful and misleading. No one, they say, would endure the substantial physical and emotional difficulty posed by the process to make a baby with blue eyes and a wicked curveball.
Let’s say that’s true. What happens when the technology improves, substantially lowering if not eliminating the “physical . . . difficulty posed by the process”? Designer baby technology will reach a state of economic viability. Is it not until then that we, as a society, say, “Enough!”
