Build-A-Baby

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Thanks to the new application of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), choosing many of a child’s characteristics is now possible, according to Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg of the Los Angeles-based IVF Fertility Center. Using PGD, Steinberg and company have claimed to be able to screen for certain cosmetic characteristics, such as hair and eye color, and to modify them.

Although this capability represents a significant and laudable advance in scientific development, abuse of cosmetic trait selection has troubling social implications that need to be confronted by governments worldwide. Altering the genetic makeup of children for purely superficial purposes—rather than to avoid diseases or disorder—is ethically wrong and could give rise to a new form of discrimination.

The practice of screening for certain diseases and disorders in unborn children and avert them is nothing new and has always been somewhat controversial. Traditionally, PGD has been used to screen for and subsequently deal with diseases and disorders like Tay-Sachs disease and Down syndrome. Thus far, the use of PGD has even gone so far as non-medical gender selection; in a recent survey, 42 percent of 137 surveyed IVF-PGD clinics reported using the practice. But the act of changing how a child looks based on arbitrary desires represents a new quandary altogether.

Giving parents the ability to pick what they consider “desirable” phenotypic traits has implications beyond family planning; as a society, we risk creating arbitrary divisions between those who have these traits and those who does not. Indeed, the entire practice smacks of eugenics programs, where humans are “bred” to represent what society considers to be desirable traits. Eugenics has become synonymous with ideas of racial purity; in Nazi Germany, programs in “racial hygiene” and the prevention of racial impurities were officially sanctioned.

We cannot allow such a threat to become a reality through cosmetic selection. The dangers of prejudice still exist, and the effects of such arbitrary discrimination will be devastating now unless we take action. With the proliferation of cosmetic selection, certain characteristics that can be associated with different races would also be associated with different social classes, and parents would have the ability to choose from these socially stigmatized characteristics.

People who would have the option of specifying how their child looks would be able to act on their ill-gotten racial or socioeconomic prejudices. Furthermore, they would identify what they consider to be superior traits by creating them in their children. Such practices will give rise to a culture where there are superior and inferior genetic compositions—all based on who can pay for non-medical PGD.

Additionally, the potential for social stratification inherent to the proliferation of non-medical PGD should give us even more reason to pause. PGD is prohibitively expensive—the first trait-selected baby was going to cost $18,000. The fact that PGD treatment results in a prevalence of “desirable” characteristics means that there would be visible and genetic differences between the financially well off and those whose parents could not afford PGD. If genetic makeup becomes dependent on wealth, then people’s looks will be an immediate indicator of their upbringing, and prejudices regarding someone’s background would be developed merely based on traits as inconsequential as eye color.

It is of course no secret that society is attracted to certain physical characteristics more attractive than others. Similarly, there are other markers that are indicative of financial wealth and social class without genetic differences. But trait selection is an especially dangerous practice in that it permanently brands children with characteristics that will be socially stigmatized by the very act of trait selection.

It was because of public outrage, not laws, that Dr. Steinberg and his team suspended their eye and hair color selection program. The United States currently has no laws prohibiting cosmetic trait selection; Dr. Steinberg describes the field as “an uncharted road.” But now that designer babies are a very real possibility, it is important that we act now to prevent a human catastrophe rather than wait until Babies “R” Us becomes more than a brand for baby clothes.


Derrick Asiedu ’12, a Crimson editorial comper, lives in Stoughton Hall.