Article: Science/Genetics

What Price Perfection?

Designer children, designing parents.

by Michael J. Sandel
02138 Magazine, May/June 2007

"Egg donor needed: Large Financial Incentive" read an ad in the Harvard Crimson a few years ago. The donor had to be at least five feet, 10 inches tall; athletic; without major family medical problems; and have a combined SAT score of 1400 or above. The price offered for this premium egg: $50,000.

Perhaps the parents were seeking a child who resembled them. Or perhaps they were hoping to trade up. Whatever the case, their extraordinary offer raised a hard moral question: Isn't there something troubling about parents ordering up a child with certain genetic traits?


LEFT: Biotechnofetishist, 2001, enamel and varnish on birch plywood, 18" x 23".

Today's prospective parents have the tools to be just as picky about the male contribution. It's no accident that California Cryobank, one of the world's leading sperm banks, has offices in Cambridge, between Harvard and MIT, and in Palo Alto, near Stanford. Cryobank advertises for donors in the Crimson and other college newspapers, and accepts only one to two percent of the donors who apply.

Of course, neither designer eggs nor Ivy League sperm guarantee that the resulting child will land a place in the freshman class. (Would he or she qualify for consideration as a "legacy" admit?) But recent advances in biotechnology are giving parents new ways of engineering the genetic traits of their children. It is now possible, for example, to choose whether to have a boy or a girl, through the same technique used to screen embryos for certain genetic diseases. For a fee of $18,480, a for-profit fertility clinic in Los Angeles advertises "sex selection with 99.9% guarantee of chosen gender." Another clinic, in Fairfax, Va., offers a sperm-sorting technique that makes it possible to choose the sex of your child before it is conceived. The clinic licensed the trademarked process (quaintly called MicroSort), which separates X- and Y- chromosome-bearing sperm by size, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which had developed it for breeding cattle.

Why should this worry us?

One reason is that sex selection can be an instrument of discrimination, typically against girls, as illustrated by the chilling gender ratios in parts of Asia. Some speculate that societies with substantially more men than women will be less stable, more violent, more prone to crime or war. The sperm-sorting company cleverly fends off such worries by offering MicroSort only to couples who want to use it for family balancing. Those with more sons than daughters can choose a girl, and vice-versa. But customers may not use the technology to stock up on children of the same sex, nor even to choose the sex of their first-born child.

The case of MicroSort, therefore, helps isolate the hardest moral question: Imagine that sperm-sorting technologies were employed in a society that did not favor boys over girls, and that wound up with a balanced sex ratio. Would sex selection under those conditions be unobjectionable? What if it became possible to select not only for sex but also for height, eye color, and skin color? What about sexual orientation, IQ, musical ability, and athletic prowess?

Even if we could engineer the genetic traits of our children without medical risk, and without skewing the sex ratio, it would still be morally troubling. Here's why: The quest for designer children is at odds with a norm that is central to parenting -- the ideal of unconditional love, an ideal that requires us to accept certain limits on our impulse for mastery and control.

To appreciate children as gifts is to accept them as they come, not as objects of our design, products of our will, or instruments of our ambition. Parental love is not contingent on the talents and attributes a child happens to have. We choose our friends and spouses at least partly on the basis of qualities we find attractive. But we do not choose our children. Their qualities are unpredictable, and even the most conscientious parents can not be held wholly responsible for the kind of children they have. That is why parenthood, more than other human relationships, teaches what theologian William F. May calls an "openness to the unbidden": a humility and enlarged human sympathy. The hubris involved in a quest for "perfect" designer children is at odds with these important traits.

Some argue that improving children through genetic engineering is really no different than the heavily managed, high-pressure child-rearing practices that have become common these days -- the crazed competition for admission to elite nursery schools, soccer practise from dawn till dusk, SAT prep courses, etc. But this similarity does not vindicate genetic engineering; instead, it gives us reason to question the low-tech hyper-parenting familiar in our time. This hyper-parenting represents the same anxious excess of mastery and control that leads to the quest for designer kids.

In a social world that prizes mastery and control, parenthood is a school for humility. That we care deeply about our children, and yet can not choose the kind we have, teaches parents to be open to the unbidden. Such openness is disposition worth affirming, not only within families, but in the wider world as well. It invites us to abide by the unexpected, to live with dissonance, to reign in the impulse to control.

Adapted from The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering, by Michael J. Sandel, with permission of the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. All rights reserved.