In a recent article by the Washington Post, reporter Gautam Naik explained how a controversial clinic in LA will soon offer “trait selection” in addition to disease screening in a process called pre implantation genetic diagnosis or PGD.
It works like this: the fertility specialists take an assortment of three day old embryos and screens those selected for select characteristics — originally for things like mental retardation, blindness and diseases. But the opportunity for so-called cosmetic screening is almost too simple. You are already screening for diseases, why not see how tall they might be, how smart they might be, what sex, what color hair? It’s still you — just the best parts of you. (If this sounds familiar it’s because you’ve seen GATTACA, a 90′s science fiction movie involving the same scenario.)
Essentially PGD is the gateway to designing children. Obviously uproar has ensued. What may have started with good intentions may soon give parents the ability to choose to bestow their children with special characteristics.
Now let me say first of all that I am in complete disagreement with this technology. It seems like we are playing God and I’ve always felt that we were not given the ability to pick and choose for a reason. The consequences are so obvious. Gender balance will be skewed, discrimination will likely follow and we will have nothing else left to chance.
Can you imagine a 1st grade class room 50 years from now if this practice becomes customary– a room filled with tall, blond haired, smart, blue-eyed athletes. What of those other, “normally” reproduced children? Will we have remedial classes left for them in hopes of catching up? Or by then will they all be automatically aborted to avoid a life full of disappointment? They would grow up knowing they could never compete with those who have been designed for greatness.
It’s a sad reality, but as I grow into an age that I will soon be carrying children, the selfish side of me wonders what I would choose if I could choose anything. I would want a girl and a boy. I would want them to be perfectly healthy. I would want them to look like my boyfriend, my future husband, but I would want them to think like me. Even saying that out loud I feel guilty and sick.
How could I not simply be happy with a healthy child? But that’s why this was started, wasn’t it? To simply know for certain your child would be healthy. Why not know they will be beautiful? How many of us would wish that we had been designed for greatness? What pain would we have avoided? What teasing would have ceased? What could we have accomplished if we had had nothing holding us back?
But then, if my parents had had a lot of embryos made and screened I would never have been chosen, for I was born with a birth defect. Inside the petri dish they could not see past my imperfections, to what I might be even with my imperfections. My brother or sister embryo would be selected, implanted, created.
Me, a deformed little embryo, would have been kept from living a life not worth living. By that I mean a life not made perfect. I would have been tossed into the waste to avoid the terrible existence which I call life. I would be collateral damage.
Yes, life can be terrible and hard. Sometimes we are friendless and alone but that is what makes us who we are. If we are designed into perfection think of all of those, all of us, who would never be. Those random two halves that may not have seemed perfect under a microscope, but they are perfect, perfect in the random chance, perfect because we didn’t get to choose. More beautiful because they are the way they are and not the way they could be.
I think God didn’t give us this decision for a reason. We are born with the ability to create human life, to reproduce, but we are not God and should not assume we have the authority to pick and choose who is fit to live, who is the most perfect. That would be a world not worth living in. It is imperfection that makes life interesting. I am imperfect, and I’m glad I had the chance to live.
And for me, my imperfect child, who ever they are, will be loved for every ounce of imperfection that they are. Like I was.
