Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
but it also misleads in ways that are counterproductive to the larger
agenda. Critics favor some kind of regulatory oversight out of mis-
givings detailed by Paul in her essay; they include the impact of genetic
manipulations on parent-child relationships, assumptions about human
worth, and attitudes toward individuals with disabilities. Notwith-
standing these and other worries, Paul notes that the exigencies of abor-
tion politics have made it difficult for those on the political Left to call
for curbs on consumer sovereignty in the realm of reproduction. In her
view, some oversight (along the lines proposed by LeRoy Walters else-
where in this volume) is badly needed. Yet to establish a degree of social
control over genetic engineering, it will first be necessary to acknowledge
that the principle of respect for autonomy is not absolute.
For a theologically based thinker like Jean Bethke Elshtain, abandon-
ment of the idea of an unalterable human nature presents serious ethical
difficulties. In “The Body and the Quest for Control,” Elshtain argues
for a moral standard rooted in our bodily nature and the order of cre-
ation itself. While she is not opposed to gene therapy or medical attempts
to alleviate suffering where reasonably possible, genetic engineering and
cloning are from the standpoint of one committed to a Christian an-
thropology merely the latest manifestations of a “messianic project” to
perfect the human body and overcome human finitude. This project,
moreover, is based on a false sense of freedom and a misconception of
the self as radically autonomous. Indeed, all signs, as Elshtain reads
them, point to a culture that has reduced the body to a commodity mal-
leable in the hands of modern technique and constructable by a techno-
cratic elite. Citing Martin Luther, she traces this reductionism to a
rebellious willfulness that separates us from God, the “source of undis-
torted love,” and from a natural order given in advance as a moral and
theological compass whose dismissal is now apparent in a number of
technological projects such as genetic screening, prenatal testing, abor-
tion on demand, and cloning. Such projects, she writes, have at their core
an ideal of bodily perfection demeaning to the disabled and the “devel-
opmentally different” among us. Thus, the flight from finitude results in
a slippery slope that ultimately narrows our concept of humanness in
light of culturally fleeting notions of normality.
Tying these various projects together, in Elshtain's view, is a funda-
mental rejection of the sphere of the “unchosen” and a concomitant
