Designing child defects

Designing child defects an act of violence on unborn
Calgary Herald
Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Designer babies, like designer jeans, are starting to come in all styles. Sadly, they're also being treated as just as much of a commodity as jeans, too.

First, there was the designer baby created through sex-selection techniques because parents already had three girls and wanted a boy, or vice-versa. Next, there was the designer baby created for parents, often a same-sex couple, whose pedigree involved two moms and a dad -- the "mother" who donated the egg, the "mother" in whose womb the egg was implanted and grew, and -- somewhere in this jumble -- the dad who might have been an anonymous sperm donor. Then again, he might have been a friend or lover of one of the moms.

Now, there's talk of drawing up blueprints for babies who will have deliberately engineered defects. Apparently, it is no longer every couple's dream to have a healthy, normal baby.

The Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore has surveyed 190 U.S. clinics that perform pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, in which embryos created in a lab dish have their DNA tested for inherited diseases. Three per cent of the clinics said they had used the technique to "select" for disability.

It's not that parents actually want their children to be born with cystic fibrosis or other tragic diseases. Instead, they're choosing to select for disabilities such as deafness, as did Candace McCullough and Sharon Duchesneau, a deaf same-sex couple from Maryland who tried to load the dice in favour of getting a deaf child by using sperm from a deaf donor.

Their son, Gauvin, is five now and suffers from a severe hearing disability. They refuse to provide him with a hearing aid.

It is absolutely unconscionable that clinics should bow to the wishes of these incredibly selfish parents who want to burden a child with a lifelong disability.

There is the issue of the cost to the health system for any special care they will need, but that is secondary to the cost to these children's psyches.

It seems children are not even looked upon as sentient, thinking beings who must grow to adulthood with the devastating knowledge that their parents deliberately set out to handicap them. What kind of psychological and emotional trauma they will suffer when this realization dawns on them appears of little consequence or interest to their parents. Blithely oblivious to the ethics or morals involved, parents like Gauvin's are even going so far as to deny him help for his disability.

This is a society that is obsessed with protecting children from abuse and violence.

Who will protect them from the abuse of commodification and the violence it wreaks upon their souls?

© The Calgary Herald 2006