Over the past few years, talk of “designer babies” has circulated among scientific communities. It is becoming increasingly louder again. With the use of IVF and more advanced genetic screening, parents are now able to know all kinds of information on the genetic breakdown of their children before they’re even pregnant with them.
Although many may be excited about this new possibility, I think we should be hesitant to embrace embryo gene screening since it can promote the commodification of children.
Last year, the Church reiterated its stance on the dignity of the human person, professing how children have “the right to have a fully human (and not artificially induced) origin” due to their unalienable dignity (Dignitas Infinita 49). A child’s existence should be the fruit of love, not of entitlement. The life of a child is always a gift, given freely and generously by the Creator. Nobody is entitled to having a child, nor does anyone have a right to motherhood or fatherhood.
But with the advancement of modern technology, often people believe they do have this right—and even more, some think they can have a say in designing their child.
What’s the big deal if a parent chooses his child’s sex or eye color? After all, they get to make every other decision, like who the other parent of the child is, when this child is conceived, and how he is raised. How is this different?
To start, the way these traits are decided is far from ethical. Eggs are artificially fertilized, creating human embryos (which modern science acknowledges as human beings) for genetic screening. Then parents are provided with multiple genetic profiles—one for each embryo—allowing them to decide which embryo they’d like implanted. Embryos not chosen for implantation are likely discarded.
The reality is this: All of those embryos are these parents’ children. They are unique human beings, with the shared DNA of their mother and father. Their existence may be temporarily suspended in time, but they do exist, and they are not just potentially their children, but actually their children.
Now imagine being asked to pick which child you want to live based on some arbitrary characteristics: “Child A is a boy, has brown eyes, and is predicted to be tall and healthy. Child B is a girl, has blue eyes, and is predicted to have some health concerns. Which would you like to live, and which would you like us to discard?”
If this does not seem disturbing enough, consider the ramifications of such a choice. The worthiness of a human being, of someone’s child, becomes contingent on physical attributes. A healthy child becomes more worthy of life than an unhealthy one, a tall one rather than short, a blue-eyed rather than brown-eyed, a male rather than female, or vise versa.
One may object that it is not a matter of, for example, a male child being better than a female one, but simply a preference of the parents. But if this is granted, it is hardly better. A child becomes equivalent to a car or house, designed and customized on the preferences of the parents. And where do these preferences come from, anyway?
In certain cultures, male children are often desired more than females. This is evident in the female infanticide and sex-selective abortion rates in countries like India. This “preference” for a male child is not arbitrary, but is the direct result of socioeconomic norms and cultural biases. Thus, this “preference” is really just sexism.
What about healthy versus unhealthy children? Everybody desires a healthy child, and nobody would willingly choose for his child to be unhealthy. In fact, it seems natural for parents to do everything in their power to ensure the health of their child over anything else.
But when selecting against unhealthy embryos, a parent is not simply choosing between this child having good or bad health, but is choosing between this healthy child and this unhealthy child.
Parents are given a life-amd-death choice between their children. What does this say about the dignity of unhealthy children? Do they have less value than a healthy child? If they have exactly the same dignity—and who would dare to argue otherwise?—why put parents in the impossible position to judge between this child and another equally valuable one? Should we really leave these children’s fates up to the mercy of personal preferences?
When considering the infinite dignity of all human beings, it is clear we shouldn’t. Each human being is worthy of life regardless of his sex, height, eye color, health, and so forth. Enabling parents to choose between children on the basis of their genotype undermines this belief, and thus offends against the dignity owed to human beings.