Reproduced with the Permission of the Christian Medical Doctors & Dentists Association, USA

Cosmetic Abortion

June 29th, 2007

Christian Medical Doctors & Dentists Association
Media Release

The Washington Times. By Fred Reed. May 19, 2007

In England, it now seems, a baby can be aborted for not being pretty enough. Maybe this was inevitable as genetic screening and techniques such as ultrasound advanced. The London Daily Telegraph Web site reports that the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has licensed a fertility clinic to screen embryos for a genetic defect that causes a severe squint. A squint?

The aborting of babies with undesired characteristics is hardly new. In China, where people have a strong preference for boys, so many female babies have been aborted that a serious imbalance between the sexes exists. Babies with fatal conditions have been aborted. We now seem to have invented cosmetic abortion. As medical genetics advances, it will become possible to predict more and more characteristics of an unborn child -- hair color, height, likelihood of obesity, perhaps intelligence. Presumably, it will then be possible to try again and again until you get your ideal baby. Selective abortion might be called passive genetic engineering. Though it is further in the future, design from scratch by genetic manipulation looks possible in principle.

Increasing biological knowledge raises a lot of ethical questions that didn't exist before. For example, it used to be that if you suffered severe brain damage in an accident, you died. Today, medical machinery can keep a body alive when the brain is dead. It might make sense to unplug the victim when there is clearly no one home, but that's euthanasia, and where do you draw the line? Similar questions come up in the case of premature babies. In the past, babies more than somewhat premature just died. Today medical science can keep extremely premature children alive, including crack babies with grave defects. Some of them are nightmarishly deformed. Where do you draw the line?

Here is another step into a curious future. First, screening tried to eliminate babies who had some inevitably fatal disorder, like cystic fibrosis. Then professor Gedis Grudzinskas, the man to whom the license was granted, gets [permission] to screen for a condition that would be unpleasant, specifically an ugly squint. Now he wants to screen for anything that might make mommy and daddy unhappy. Maybe the child screens to be healthy and in fact brilliant, but maybe daddy can't stand nerds, or the DNA says the child might be overweight. This makes abortion begin to sound like a branch of psychotherapy, and child-bearing like shopping. "Creepy" isn't a scientific term, but maybe it fits.

CMDA CEO, David Stevens, MD: "The underlying philosophical tenet of the abortion movement is that a unborn child’s worth is based on whether they are wanted or not by their mother. If you are a wanted baby, you have inestimatable value. If you are an unwanted child, then a quick trip to the abortion clinic can remove the 'parasite' that holds mom’s future hostage. Genetic screening, 4-D ultrasound, and other new prenatal technologies just allow a more 'informed' choice. How can a rational person oppose making a decision on hard data when they already allow mothers to kill their children for no reason at all?

"Once it is socially and legally acceptable to kill your own child, it is logically impossible to draw a line in the sand to prevent negative eugenics (preimplantation genetic diagnosis, genetic profiling of the unborn, etc.) and positive eugenics (sex selection ['family balancing'], genetic enhancement, transhumanism and beyond).

"We have already crossed the Rubicon. The die is cast.

"That is why the abortion battle is so important. We have to get back on the right side of the river, before we find ourselves in the wilderness of a posthuman future where few want to go."