No Soft-Pedaling in Argument for Altering How We Make Babies
Eugenics is as close to a taboo as one can find in science today. Find someone who calls himself a eugenicist and you’re likely to have found someone most people would call a kook.
At the same time, there are plenty of geneticists, embryologists, fertility consultants, reproductive endocrinologists and genetic counselors. The federally funded Human Genome Project is methodically cataloging every nucleotide in every gene in our bodies. In vitro fertilization is a commonplace. And gene therapy is the hot synonym for hope in medical research.
There is, obviously, an important difference between the eugenicists of the past and the biotechnologists of the present. No one is standing up today for the sterilization of the “subpar” or the removal of “human rubbish.” The crude recommendations of so-called negative eugenics are not for discussion.
Nonetheless, science is marching on, as they used to say, and accumulating knowledge and know-how that eugenicists hardly dared to dream of. When genes can be altered or substituted in a petri dish, and “defective” or undesirable fertilized eggs can be identified and selectively killed, many of the grosser tactics of the eugenicists may seem less immoral than old-fashioned.
In “Unzipped Genes: Taking Charge of Baby-Making in the New Millennium,” Washington lawyer Martine Rothblatt has rolled up her sleeves and plunged her hands deep into this science’s bucket of promise and peril. There is nothing warm and fuzzy about this book. Some of it will be dismissed as radical nonsense. But Rothblatt is uncommonly forthright in looking this science in the eye: She has the courage to take its development as a foregone conclusion and to openly celebrate its creative potentials while she proposes safeguards against its dangers.
The book will shock many readers, not only because of the wildness of some of Rothblatt’s recommendations but also for what it takes as a given: Science fiction is being made into living fact. Ready or not, here it comes.
In her preface, Rothblatt calls herself “a biotechnology convert” and states that we both “cannot survive” without it and “cannot survive its unethical use.”
She bases her ethics on the principles of “freedom of expression, prohibition of discrimination and protection from disease.” In creating children, she argues, people should be allowed virtually limitless freedom, including the freedom to use the entire gamut of human genes and even genes transplanted from other species.
The greatest promise, in Rothblatt’s eyes, lies in the coming technological capacity to make reproduction a fully informed and conscious creative act. She embraces the “Every child a wanted child” standard more closely than anyone I’ve ever heard of, and she audaciously--many will prefer to say preposterously--offers a proposition directly aimed at implementing it.
“Inocuseeding” is Rothblatt’s plan. By it she means the universal vasectomizing of all teenage males, just after they’ve surrendered a couple of samples of sperm for cryo-preservation. (With time and progress, this procedure may be able to be effected just after birth, with circumcision, vasectomy and the banking of future sperm cells all done together.)
Inocuseeding will guarantee, she argues, that children aren’t made by accident, and besides its good effects on child design it will bring vast benefit to the women of the world, who now are so vulnerable to unintended pregnancy and the costs and illnesses that can come with it.
Inocuseeding is a sort of immunization, she argues. Compulsory vaccination has long been deemed moral and legal. She cites the 1905 Supreme Court ruling in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, in which a man’s unwillingness to be vaccinated against smallpox was held to be less important than the state’s right to protect citizens from disease. This country vigorously promoted and accepted vaccinations against polio, a disease that affected only a fraction of the number harmed by unwanted pregnancy.
