Choosing disabled, not designer, babies
Pre-natal genetic testing is all too often a fighting word in autism circles. If expecting parents knew they were going to have a child with autism, would they choose not to the child in what has been called “eugenic abortion”?
Some disabled parents are choosing to have babies like themselves by deliberately choosing “malfunctioning genes that produce disabilities like deafness or dwarfism.” An article in today’s New York Times reports on a forthcoming article in the journal Fertility and Sterility. In preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or P.G.D, embryos are created in a test tube and their DNA analyzed before it is implanted in a woman’s uterus. Some 3 percent of parents say that they have intentionally used P.G.D. to select an embryo for a child with a disability.
In other words, some parents had the painful and expensive fertility procedure for the express purpose of having children with a defective gene. It turns out that some mothers and fathers don’t view certain genetic conditions as disabilities but as a way to enter into a rich, shared culture.
It’s tempting to see this practice as an alarming trend; for example, the online magazine Slate called it “the deliberate crippling of children.”
But a desire for children with genetic defects isn’t new. In 2002, for example, The Washington Post Magazine profiled Candace A. McCullough and Sharon M. Duchesneau, a lesbian and deaf couple from Maryland who both attended Gallaudet University and set out to have a deaf child by intentionally soliciting a deaf sperm donor.
Perhaps a better way to phrase this might be “a desire for children different just like oneself.”
8 opinions for Choosing disabled, not designer, babies
Someone
Dec 5, 2006 at 4:08 pm
I can understand the need for having children that are similar to oneself, but this whole thing is pretty selfish.
natalia
Dec 5, 2006 at 7:40 pm
if it happens that we have any, we would take whatever baby God gives us, even if it turns out NT. i mean how confusing could s/he be if we know each other from when s/he’s small?
Daisy
Dec 5, 2006 at 10:11 pm
I am hearing impaired. My son is visually impaired (for practical purposes, blind) and has Aspergers Syndrome. We don’t have the same disability, but we share other things in common — like our open-mindedness toward others with disabilities.
zilari
Dec 5, 2006 at 11:26 pm
The potential for parents to be able to choose their future childrens’ attributes is really going to start bringing unexamined prejudices to the surface, I imagine. If parents are allowed to select for a non-deaf baby, what is the rationale for not allowing them to select a deaf baby? Either way, you’re still choosing one potential person over another.
And you’re not choosing between “disabled” or “non-disabled” anyway, but rather, between a set of potential *entire persons*, each with a unique set of initial conditions.
Kassiane
Dec 5, 2006 at 11:53 pm
If it isn’t selfish for parents to pre-screen against conditions, I don’t see why it’s selfish to screen FOR those conditions-seeing as the parents likely HAVE them and know they aren’t the hell they’re made out to be. IVF tends to be a one shot deal, or used to be.
Were I to have kids biologically (not likely, I’d probably foster, but this is an ‘if’) i dont know that I’d know what to do with a neurotypical kid! I’d know how to teach him/her somersaults and cartwheels, but that isn’t…LIFE. And honestly, it would kill me when my son/daughter was embarrassed by mom having a seizure or freaking out in some other way at the store or whatever. But they’d still be my child, and while I’d UNDERSTAND an autistic kid better, I’d love them no less regardless of neurology or anything else.
Small at birth would be good though….
Kristina Chew, PhD
Dec 6, 2006 at 10:42 am
Good point, Zilari—-Dr. Darshak M. Sanghavi, the pediatric cardiologist who wrote the article writes in the last paragraph:
Stephen Drake
Dec 6, 2006 at 11:57 am
I wanted to stress something the Times article failed to make absolutely clear. McCullough and Duchesneau didn’t make use of prenatal screening to ensure any specific outcome.
Here’s a link to a BMJ article about them:
http://jme.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/28/5/283
Quote from the article:
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The women, both professionals in the mental health field, insist that they would still love their child if it could hear: “A hearing baby would be a blessing. A deaf baby would be a special blessing”.
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Another quote from the article:
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Ken Connor, president of the Family Research Council, a profamily organisation, also criticises the deliberate attempt to create a deaf child. “To intentionally give a child a disability, in addition to all the disadvantages that come as a result of being raised in a homosexual household, is incredibly selfish”, he claims.
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Connor’s statement proves a point I often try to make to people. Many Christian Conservatives feel the world would be better with fewer of us in it. They just disagree with the “left” on how that is best accomplished.
–Stephen
Kristina Chew, PhD
Dec 6, 2006 at 1:59 pm
Thanks, Stephen, for the link—–the issues raised in the article open questions that are not easy to answer.
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