Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
It is difficult to overstate just how widely accepted the technocratic
view is and how overwhelmingly we, as a culture, are acquiescing to its
premises. In a review in the
Times Literary Supplement
of four new
topics on the genetic revolution, the reviewer matter-of-factly opined that
“we must inevitably start to choose our descendants,” adding that we
do this now in “permitting or preventing the birth of our own children
according to their medical prognosis, thus selecting the lives to come.”
So long as society does not cramp our freedom of action, we will stay
on the road of progress and exercise sovereign choice over birth by con-
signing to death those with a less-than-stellar potential for a life not
“marred by an excess of pain or disability.”
27
Molecular biologist Robert
Sinsheimer calls for a “new eugenics,” a phrase most try to avoid given
its association with the biopolitical ideology of mid-twentieth-century
National Socialism. As Sinsheimer writes, “The new eugenics would
permit in principle the conversion of all the unfit to the highest genetic
level.”
28
With the widespread adoption of prenatal screening, now
regarded as routine, so much so that prospective parents who decline
this panoply of procedures are treated as irresponsible, we see at work
the presumption that life should be wiped clean of any and all imper-
fection, inconvenience, and risk. Creation itself must be put right.
The
New York Times
alerted us to this fact on December 2, 1997, in
an article titled “On Cloning Humans, 'Never' Turns Swiftly into 'Why
Not' ” by science editor Gina Kolata.
29
Kolata points out that in the
immediate aftermath of Dolly the cloned sheep who stared out at us from
the covers of so many newspapers and magazines, there was much con-
sternation and rumbling.
30
But opposition dissipated quickly, she con-
tinues, with fertility centers soon conducting “experiments with human
eggs that lay the groundwork for cloning. Moreover, the Federal Gov-
ernment is supporting new research on the cloning of monkeys, encour-
aging scientists to perfect techniques that could easily be transferred to
humans.” A presidential ethics commission may have recommended a
“limited ban on cloning humans,” but after all, argues Kolata, “it is an
American tradition to allow people the freedom to reproduce in any way
they like.” This claim is simply false in terms of both the historical and
the legal record. In common with any society of which we have any
knowledge, past or present, U.S. society has built into its interstices a
variety of limitations on so-called reproductive freedom. But the view
