Designer toddlers and other matters

My professorial friend sent me this editorial from yesterday's Los Angeles Times:

California Cryobank and designer babies

The L.A.-based sperm bank offers an option to prospective parents of seeing which celebrity a donor looks like. That's just silly.
July 31, 2010


In a marriage of modern science and the culture of celebrity, a Los Angeles-based sperm bank is grouping donors according to which famous people they resemble.
On its website, the California Cryobank asks: "Have you ever wondered if your favorite donor looks like anyone famous? You know how tall he is and his hair and eye color, but wouldn't it be great to have an idea of what he really LOOKS like? Now you can find out with a CLICK of your mouse!" Browsers are typically directed to pictures of two or three celebrity lookalikes.
The purpose of the celebrity option is to compensate for the fact that, for privacy reasons, photographs of the donors themselves aren't available. But it surely will appeal to star-struck prospective parents who dream of the day when a passerby peers into the stroller and remarks on Junior's resemblance to this action hero or that talent contest winner — or maybe a combination of the two?
The program has its critics. David Stevens, chief executive officer of the Christian Medical and Dental Assns., said that it's "another step down the road to the illusion of designer children." But patrons of sperm banks long have been able to express a preference for some traits over others. Even if they don't avail themselves of the celebrity option, women and couples are "designing" babies, or trying to anyway, when they choose donors based on height, ethnicity or intelligence.
Moreover, modern reproductive technology isn't the only way to pursue a preference for potential fathers who look like a favorite movie star. How many blind dates have begun with an assurance that "he looks just like Rudolph Valentino (or James Dean or Leonardo DiCaprio)"?
It's one thing to hope for a strong, healthy, smart child, but it's quite another to insist that your sperm donor look like Zac Efron, Shia LaBeouf or Seth Rogen (hey, what's he doing on the list?). Genetic engineering of the first kind may or may not be morally wrong, but at least it's understandable. The second is just silly. If you aspire to celebrity lookalike children, perhaps you're not quite ready to be a parent.


Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times

He enclosed this note: Robert, it was good seeing you--I agree, if we lived closer we'd have a good ongoing conversation.   By the way, the things I said about embryo harvesting are not really a right/left issue---I've had some good talks with Nat Hentoff about these matters and he and I are on exactly the same square.   Thought the article below might interest you.

And my reply, for all that it is worth: Hentoff had his epiphany years ago - I don't look at it as a left/right issue either, the equation at least in regards to harvesting is the pragmatic effect of helping living people cure their diseases as opposed to factory farming in some Huxleyan nightmare scenario. Since most of the stem cells are getting flushed anyway, I tend to favor the latter, I also am in favor of organ donation, we probably see eye to eye on that one.  Cloning and genetic engineering are an entirely different beast - if you push the pursuits to the nth degree, is it better to have brilliant nordic designer babies or to disallow people the ability to end around some fatal familial trait like polycystic kidneys?  In the end, we must be really careful about limiting people's decision making choices yet we have to somehow avert the catastrophe of trusting humans to make rational choices about designer genetics.

As I said the other day, this doctor and I had an interesting discussion about abortion. Well meaning, good intentioned people have differing opinions on the subject. The Doctor said that he had met 16 year olds on their sixth procedure, the act reduced to something on the emotional order of flossing one's teeth. My retort was that god forbid said 16 year old had delivered the six kids. Children having babies is usually a bad deal for both parent and child. And it is not like we need more bodies on a planet already at a tipping point for many resources.

I mention that in the Jewish tradition, the life of the mother is always paramount and that life is not thought to start until the first breath is drawn. He counters with rabbinical precepts that hold all life as sacred.

I don't belittle because maybe we have forsaken the notion of sanctity when it comes to life? Yet I think that an individual, an individual woman is probably the best person around to judge is she is or is not capable of becoming a decent mother. That if we start letting the government decide who carries what to term and when, we have given up a basic fundamental right.  I think there was a case in Florida last year where a District Attorney went after a woman in court for not carrying a child to term.

Conservatives and libertarians are famous for celebrating the individual rights to carry guns and privately discriminate and celebrate their religion as they see fit. They just can't stand other people exercising their moral choices when it comes to who they choose to love, what gender, color and delivery method and their individual choice to be parents or not.

So you can have free reign as long as you don't run afoul of the supposed majority's notion of your duty to god and country and then they are going to officially take control of your uterus.

My pro life friends and I will continue to disagree but I am getting a much deeper appreciation of where some of them are coming from. I can understand their not wanting their tax dollars to fund a procedure they abhor on every level. I feel the same way about certain wars. But these are not necessarily stupid people and many of them are coming from a basic respect for life that I appreciate and admire.

I think the best of all worlds would be when contraception is so prevalent that abortion would not be necessary. I wonder if the anecdote of the sixteen year old girl is in any way the norm or the rare exception? But I will never know what she is feeling. Because it is not my choice.

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I feel the same way about designer babies as I do about genetically modified rice. It is a very bad idea, humans being too stupid not to look for the most vapid and inconsequential of attributes to fashion their offspring with.  It is a dangerous pandora's box which we lack all responsibility or knowledge to deal with, let alone master. Pardon me if I put my faith in evolution. We will breed the human equivalent of the American Bulldog, with all the attendant breathing disorders or the linebred thoroughbred horse, with it's weak navicular bone. The human body, brought to you by Monsanto™.