Debating Matters. Designer Babies: Where Should We Draw the Line? by Ed Ellie Lee. Hodder and Stoughton, £5.99, pp 81. ISBN 0 340 84835 9. Rating: ★★★
On 29 August 2000, Adam Nash was born in Colorado. What made Adam different from the billions of baby boys born previously was the selection of Adam from a range of embryos ensuring he would be free from the gene fault that causes Fanconi's anaemia, which affected his sister Molly. To survive, Molly needed a successful bone marrow transplant and her parents were informed that the odds of success increased dramatically when the donor was a sibling. Shortly after his birth, Adam became a donor to his sister and on 4 January 2001 the family went home following a successful procedure at the University of Minnesota Medical Center.
In February 2002 the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) authorised the use of preimplantation genetic diagnosis to provide a Leeds couple with a child free from the gene fault that causes thalassaemia. Like Adam, the resulting child is destined to become a donor to his or her sibling.
Writing in this selection of essays from the London based Institute of Ideas, Agnes Fletcher and Josephine Quintavalle both oppose these developments, arguing that the use of such technology to avoid disability undermines the rights of disabled people, encourages selfish and perhaps even eugenic tendencies among parents, and violates natural laws that should be respected. In their essay, Veronica English and Ann Sommerville comment that the very phrase “designer baby” “epitomises the disquiet felt about attempts to control or manipulate reproduction in ways that seem to some unreasonable or beyond the realms of acceptability.”
Such fears seem to me ill founded and, worse, rest upon a sadly negative opinion of humanity. The fact that science can repair the problems caused by nature does not imply that it is right to discriminate against actually existing disabled persons. John Harris argues, for example, that if we had the technology to confer immunity to HIV, cancer, heart disease, and so forth before birth it would be morally correct to do so.
It also takes a fairly dim view of parents to think that future generations of children will be selected and rejected on the basis of trivial features such as hair colour and height. Furthermore, comments Juliet Tizzard, such concerns malign the current therapeutic uses of preimplantation genetic diagnosis.
The issues raised in this slim volume are passionately argued and well presented but I am saddened that the birth of healthy children can provide for such vexed debate.