Designers and Deformers

Pro-lifers and bio-ethicists have long warned that we were headed toward the day when people would order babies like they order a new car.  In this brave new world, abortion, altered genetics, in-vitro fertilization, frozen embryos and a myriad of other Frankenstein-like scientific “advances” will allow us to spec-out perfect designer babies to suit every need.  Men and women will no longer be mere parents, but informed and enlightened consumers.  At the same time, babies will be transformed into a product whose value is not intrinsic, but only determined by what they can do for those who order them.      

Apparently, we can stop predicting that such an environment will one day exist.  One day is here.  In San Antonio, Texas, a company called the Abraham Center of Life is now offering off-the-shelf embryos for single women and infertile couples.  Customers make their selection after reviewing information about the egg and sperm donor of the baby they are thinking about buying.  This data includes the race, educational background, personality type, physical appearance and other relevant characteristics.  Customers are also allowed to see pictures of the donors at various times of their lives.  For customers who are unable or unwilling to carry the child, the company will even arrange for the services of a surrogate mom.  

The company’s founder, Jennalee Ryan, rejects the charge that she is ushering in the creation of a “Master Race.”  However, her center requires that egg donors have at least some college education and sperm donors must have advanced post-graduate degrees.  
Neither can have a criminal background.  

Responding to the claim that she, and her clients, are making decisions based on IQ points and physical appearance, she told the Washington Post that, “If I do discriminate, it’s that I only want healthy, intelligent people.”      

Meanwhile, some people with physical handicaps are insisting that they too be allowed to design their own perfect babies.  To this group of people, perfect means a baby with the same handicap they have.  A survey published in the medical journal, Fertility and Sterility, found at least four embryo screening clinics in the U.S. that admit to having assisted people in creating what are being called deformer babies – children with disabilities specifically requested by the parents.  

To date, it appears that the most common reason for using this technology is to create babies that are either deaf or dwarfs.  One deaf lesbian couple, Sharon Duchesneau and Candy McCullough, say that when they wanted a baby they chose a particular sperm donor because he was deaf and came from a family with five generations of deafness.  The baby was born with residual hearing in one ear, but Duchesneau and McCullough have made it clear that they will not allow the little boy to be fitted with a hearing aid.

In the past, whenever the issue of sex-selection abortion was brought up, pro-lifers were ridiculed for suggesting that they represented some kind of slippery slope.  But now, Duchesneau and McCullough are openly stating that their use of technology to create a deaf child is no different than someone using technology, for example sex-selection abortion, to get a baby of the desired gender.    

Going down the deformer baby trail raises some interesting, and probably unanswerable, philosophical questions.  Perhaps the most troubling is whether a line can ever be drawn.  If a blind couple discovers that their unborn child is sighted, do they have the right to insist that their doctor do something to cause the child to be blind?  If not, why not?  

After all, they could have it legally killed through abortion if they so chose.  What about mental disorders.  Does a schizophrenic mom have a right to turn her mentally healthy unborn baby into a schizophrenic?  Again, if not, why not?  Who gets to design the “perfectness” scale?

When dwarfs Cara and Gibson Reynolds were criticized because they were considering using embryo screening to create a child who was also a dwarf, an outraged Cara replied, “You cannot tell me that I cannot have a child who’s going to look like me.”  Then, in an astonishing perversion of logic, she went on to attack people who oppose the intentional creation of deformer babies claiming that they are “... playing God.”

The reality is, at the moment America decided that it was acceptable to create designer babies it became impossible to oppose deformer babies.  They are opposite sides of the same coin.  It is as legitimate for a deaf person to consider a hearing child imperfect as it is for a “normal” person to consider a Down syndrome child imperfect.  It is also true that Duchesneau and McCullough are correct that artificially creating a deaf child is no different than artificially creating a girl instead of a boy.

The underlying problem is, legal abortion transformed babies from being full and valued members of the human family into a commodity that we can choose or unchoose just like we choose or unchoose what brand of toothpaste to buy.  Until we correct that, things far worse than pre-fab embryos and deformer babies are on the way.  It may be frightening to contemplate, but we are not even close to the bottom of the slippery slope.