I am not terribly interested in condemning moms. It may be satisfying on some grim level to make a monster out of a mother, but I am pretty sure it is not morally edifying.
So I am reluctant to comment on the recent hullabaloo over the in vitro fertilization (IVF) “designer baby” option. It was just a matter of time before a clinic explicitly offered “predictive genomics” screening embryos for reasons not directly health-related. (Think blue eyes, brown hair, tall, loves to cuddle.)
But after people got on the phone to complain about a Manhattan clinic that offered to let parents choose traits like eye and hair color when selecting embryos for implanting, the clinic rescinded its offer, declining to be known publicly as a designer-baby factory.
I am guessing some of the complaints went something like this: “What kind of horrible person would choose this way?” More specifically, many people are asking “What kind of nutcase mother would select her baby like she would a doll?”
This sort of question just does not do much except make most people feel better about themselves for not having chosen our children that way. I may come out of the deal morally superior, but not really better. As a dead Danish philosopher once wrote, “To become better or seem to be better by means of comparison with the badness of others is, after all, a bad way to become better.”
Truth is, human beings do choose whom to love for some very suspect reasons, and we have done so since well before the option of “predictive genomics.” I find it more helpful is to ask: What sort of culture cultivates this particular set of reproductive options? A good question to ask of any people is “Which families, and why?” Who is supposed to love whom, at any given point in a people’s history?
Why is it that now, at a time when “hope” is supposed to still be resilient over despair, there would be a thriving market for choosing to love a child who looks more like you, or perhaps more like someone more aesthetically normative than your spouse? (It might be worth noting that the man now running the free world was beloved by a mother and grandmother who did not share his supposedly relevant “predictive genomics.”)
Rather than condemning the choosers, I want to ask about the context in which the choice is made, and why other choices just seem less attractive. Why does the expenditure of time and effort involved in pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) on embryos seem more worthwhile than the time and effort to prepare to adopt one of the thousands of children or teenagers waiting to be received out of foster care?
Granted, the commitment to wade in those waters is a big one. It takes real work to become the sort of parent able to love well a child who has been through separation and often trauma. Yet I suspect many more people in the United States would be able to do the work, and to love foster children, if called more directly to do so.
It takes one kind of courage to be a society willing to take on the responsibility of choosing the traits of the next generation. It takes another kind of courage to take on the responsibility of loving children whose lives are now marked by loss and pain.
Which kind of courage makes more sense? This sort of question might make some people feel bad, but in a way that could help some people become better.
Foster-to-adopt parents need help and encouragement, and a team of people ready to commit on the micro and macro level, to bring casseroles and to vote for more public school funding. I think that the United States is home to a whole bunch of people capable of cultivating this particular set of reproductive options.
Maybe I am still coasting on the winds of Jan. 20, but I think it is plausible and morally edifying to hope.
Dr. Hall, associate professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity School and an ordained elder in the Southwest Texas, is the author of Conceiving Parenthood: The Protestant Spirit of Biotechnological Reproduction (Eerdmans, 2007).
Amy Laura Hall
