Reported by the Times Online:
A WOMAN is pregnant with Britain’s first designer baby selected to prevent an inherited cancer, The Times can reveal.Embryos at risk of developing a disease are not treated or cured. They are deemed genetically "defective" and killed.Her decision to use controversial genetic-screening technology will ensure that she does not pass on to her child the hereditary form of eye cancer from which she suffers.
MaryMeetsDolly concludes,
I submit to you that all of us are in some way "genetically defective." We all carry genes that make us susceptable to cancer, or heart disease, or stroke, or high cholesterol, or obesity, or hairy backs, or thinning hair. I think you get the picture.And some of us are shorter, some are faster, some live longer ... we get the picture.
any student of anthropology can show you the many different things that people will do to become "beautiful." So if things like physical beauty are subjective, it seems to follow that things like "genetically perfect" would also be subjective
hmmmm, i'm pretty disgueted by this in theory, but being born short and fat is quite a bit different than being born with a predisposition for a fatal disease.
Bryan,
It may seem that way now, but many agree that screening against a trait is the same as screening for others. Dr. Lee Silver, professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton and cloning advocate, wrote in his book, Remaking Eden that there is great "difficulty inherent in drawing a moral boundary between acceptable and unacceptable uses of [embryo screening] technology."
Bonnie Steinbock, professor of Philosophy, agrees, "If procreative liberty gives women the right to abort through the first two trimesters for any reason what so ever, it is hard to see what justification there could be for putting limits on genetic screening and non-transfer of embryos."
Unfortunately, she is right, there is no justification.
rebecca,
i actually do agree that everyone draws their own lines, and thus i disagree with your conclusion that "there is no justification."
on a side note- a problem here is that your philosophy professor is making a straw-man argument: there is no "procreative liberty" that gives women the right to abort through the first two trimesters. a quick review of state laws (you can start with my own state, Texas, at texasrighttolife.com) shows that many states restrict abortion at some point in the second trimester (in texas, at the 16th week).
really, though, that's neither here nor there (aside from it being important to know what you state law allows and what it does not). i do understand that many severe health problems are behaviorial and environmental, and as such they cannot be geneticaally screened. and i will concede the semantical relationship between screening against and for various traits, but i have no problem with screening out cancerous genes: i'm in favor of there being fewer people born with a risk of cancer. that's not at all the same as abortion-for-gender-selection.