A LOS Angeles clinic announced plans recently to deliver babies made-to-order by skin, hair and eye colour. Curly or wavy hair was an option too.
After some public outcry, the offer was hastily withdrawn - unless you have a family history of albinism or other pigmentation disorders. But putting aside the clinic's hucksterism for the moment, why the disquiet? After all, people generally want their children to be like them - just a tad better looking and a wee bit smarter. A blonde mum wanting a blonde child doesn't sound so bad.
Of course, if you have jet black hair, you probably won't shop around for a blonde child. But even if you did, what would be wrong with that? We value the freedom to decide for ourselves whether to have children or not, when and how many to have, or whom to procreate with. So why shouldn't we also be free to choose the traits of our children if we could?
In January, the first baby girl was born in Britain without the BRCA genes that confer an 80 per cent risk of breast cancer. Doctors had screened embryos so her parents could pick one without the dreaded genes. Many felt that was acceptable.
In 2007, British doctors screened embryos for a couple so their baby would be squint-free. Squints make the eyes look downwards or sideways. So some said this was just a cosmetic condition and screening for it was frivolous. But repeated operations are needed to correct bad squints - with no promise of success ever. Is it so wrong to choose a squint-free baby? If that is morally ambiguous, consider choosing a baby for sporting, academic or musical talent. For some, such an act would be morally unacceptable for it would deny the child an open future by predisposing him to a life along pre-set lines.
Yet, even without such genetic pre-selections, no child is ever born free to become whatever his heart desires. We inculcate this idea in our young that they can be whatever they want to be. In truth, we are not born with 'starting gate equality' in life's race. There is no level playing field both in terms of our parents' wealth or social standing as well as in the genetic desiderata we inherit in terms of looks, height, intelligence or predispositions to disease. However hard you may train, you won't ever be Tiger Woods in the absence of his perfect genetic endowments for golf. So why would it be unfair or unacceptable to equip a child with a predisposition of one's choosing?
Perhaps the problem is that trying to master Nature causes us to depreciate 'the gifted character of human powers and achievements'. Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel says in his 2008 book, The Case Against Perfection - Ethics In The Age Of Genetic Engineering, that: 'To appreciate our children as gifts is to accept them as they come, not as objects of our design or products of our will or instruments of our ambition.' Conversely, choosing their traits beforehand would depreciate the gift of life and jeopardise the ethic of giftedness, he feels. This argument appeals to us, I think, because it matches our modern ideal of parenting. The cue comes in Professor Sandel's observation about 'hyper-parenting'. This is when super-demanding parents compel their child to fulfil their dreams - and fill his life with ballet, piano and calligraphy classes - rather than allow the child to pursue whatever his gifts and talents impel him towards.
If so, the unease we feel towards designer babies is not really about crossing some natural boundaries. Rather, it arises from the hubris that this particular parenting style is considered to involve. But this is just a preference on our part - a feeling - about parenting styles.
Moreover, if the ethic of giftedness is to guide conduct, there should be a gift-giver to feel indebted towards. Unless you are a religious person for whom God is the gift-giver, Nature is just a given, simply something there. Can one talk rationally about giftedness in purely secular terms?
Prof Sandel figures you could if you also first came up with a compelling account of the human good in a practice like parenting that is undermined by genetic intervention. The obvious human good implicated by parenting is that strong families conduce to social stability. So the social institution called parenting matters because of its utility.
Another thing it implicates is our feelings. Being loving parents makes us feel good - but that may be just because we were brought up to believe we should. Perhaps we had loving parents and doting grandparents. Or, we had bad ones and we hope to compensate by being good ones ourselves. Whichever the case, it would come down to mere feelings - a matter of aesthetics, perhaps, but not of ethics.
If that is so, then E.B. White might have said it best. In The Points Of My Compass - Letters From The East, The West, The North, The South (1962), the essayist declared: 'I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.'
If our objection to designer-babies is about savouring Nature as unsullied as possible, that would be right for you - but only if you were inclined to such an aesthetic preference. A secularist of a more utilitarian bent might feel that, if altering Nature gets the results he wants, then that is the way forward. As feelings go, why is that wrong?
I say go get that olive-skinned, brown-eyed, squint-free, brunette baby girl with curls and no risk of breast cancer, if you feel you want to, regardless.
This article was first published in The Straits Times.
