What Are We Really Asking For?
If we could design our children like we design houses, selecting every feature, eliminating every flaw, should we? And more significantly, what are we really asking for when we talk about the "perfect" baby?
Here's what really gets me worked up about this whole thing: the word "defect." We throw it around so cavalierly, like we're talking about a dinged car bumper or scratched phone display. And we're talking about human beings. We're talking about deciding, before a child ever draws his first breath, what it is that makes him worth being as he is.
I'll be honest with you – a part of me is lured by the promise. Who would not wish to spare their child from life with debilitating diseases inherited through genetics? Who would not wish to give them an advantage – better health, faster minds, stronger bodies? When I think about cystic fibrosis, about Huntington's disease, about all of those genetic diseases that steal life and break hearts, gene editing sounds like mercy. It sounds like love.
But then I'm wondering: where's the line? Because if we can delete Huntington's, why not insert higher IQ? If we can heal muscular dystrophy, why not enhance athletic capability? If we can fix genetic blindness, why not pick eye color while we're at it? And now we're not talking about preventing suffering any longer. We're talking about shopping for children.
The thing that bothers me the most is how we've spoken ourselves into thinking that it's all about the children when it's actually about us. It's about our own fears, our own anxieties, our own desperate attempt to control the uncontrollable. We say we want to give our children every advantage, but what we really want is to make sure that they won't embarrass us. We want insurance from the sloppy, complicated reality of raising humans who might not turn out as we envisioned.
I think about what "perfect" even is. Perfect at what? Perfect to whom? Because here's the uncomfortable truth: our definition of perfection is based on our culture, our prejudices, our limited understanding of what constitutes a good life. We're not dispassionate judges of human value. We're people who have likes and dislikes and prejudices and blind spots the size of continents.
Take intelligence, for instance. We act as if it's this nice neat thing that can be measured and maximized, such as computer RAM. Intelligence is lunatically complex. There's musical intelligence, there's emotional intelligence, the kind of intelligence that gets you through social navigation or corrects mundane issues or makes people laugh when they laugh most. If we're designing for intelligence, which sort are we choosing? And what are we losing when we optimize for one type over another?
And let's also talk about something we call "defects." Autism, for example. Sure, it gets in the way. Sure, it might require accommodation and patience and tolerance. But autistic humans have given us fantastic innovations, artwork, insights that a neurotypical brain might never achieve. As with ADHD, as with dyslexia, with a hundred other conditions we're all too quick to label as problems to be overcome. We're so focused on the difficulties we become blind to the abilities that sometimes exist alongside them.
I'm not romanticizing disability or imagining that genetic disease doesn't come with actual suffering. It does. I'm not saying we should keep suffering around for some great ideal. But what I'm saying is that our eagerness to eliminate difference might be eliminating something essential about human variation. We might be creating a world where everybody is the same, impoverished concept of normal, in which the beautiful unruliness of human difference gets pared away for a genetic monoculture.
Here's what truly scares me: the financial side. At present, genetic disease hits families regardless of wealth. Wealthy parents and poor parents are both prey to the randomness of genetics. But gene editing won't be affordable, at least not in the beginning. It'll be expensive, elitist, for those who can afford it. And what that means is that we're no longer talking about eradicating genetic disease alone, we're talking about creating a genetic class system. The enhanced and the unenhanced. The edited and the natural. The perfect and the flawed.
Imagine a world where your genetic upgrades dictate your fate. Where your boss knows, from your genes, whether or not your parents could pay for the IQ boosters, the disease resistance, the physical upgrades. Where your natural-born vulnerabilities are emblems of your family's wealth. We already are playing God with individual children, threatening a world in which genetic advantage mounts generation by generation.
And then I return to the suffering. The real, unyielding suffering of children born with conditions that cause pain, disability, early death. How do I reconcile my philosophical objections with a parent's desperate wish to end their child's suffering? How do I argue for preserving genetic diversity when that diversity includes diseases that steal childhood and devastate families?
Maybe the question isn't whether to allow gene editing but how. Maybe we have to be brutal about the difference between medical necessity and cosmetic desire. Maybe we need safeguards against genetic modifications turning into status indicators reserved for the rich. Maybe we need to have painful conversations about what we're really trying to achieve and what we're really willing to risk.
Because here's the thing: once we go down this path, we can't turn around. If we decide that certain genetic variations are off-limits, if we conclude that parents owe it and have a responsibility to optimize their children, then we've defined, at an essential level, what it means to be human. We've turned procreation into production, children into projects, love into a quality control process.
I think about the parents I've known, the way they love their children with every part of themselves even when – especially when – those children don't live up to the standards of the world. How they muster a strength they never realized they had, develop empathy they might never have known otherwise, build systems of empathy and care around the particular needs of their family. Would we be denied it if we could somehow censor out the mess? Would we lose some essential part of what it means to be human?
And yet I am also considering the parents who've lost their children to genetic illnesses, who've spent years in hospitals, who've had to make impossible decisions about treatment and quality of life. How can I, lounging here in my comfortable chair, tell them to have embraced the suffering? How do I justify saving genetic variation when it's not my child struggling to breathe, when it's not my family going bankrupt over medical expenses?
Maybe the real question we're not asking is not whether we can create perfect babies, but whether we're prepared to live with what happens when we try. If we're prepared for a world where genetic engineering is an arms race, where "natural" kids are handicapped, where human worth is increasingly defined by optimization rather than being.
The technology is coming whether we like it or not. Whether we will be smart enough to wield that power wisely. Whether we can distinguish between preventing actual suffering and imposing our own notions of perfection. Whether we will remember that what is most uniquely human – love, creativity, courage, the capacity to learn and change – cannot be programmed into DNA.
I don't have easy answers. I wish I did. But I do know this: if we're going to monkey around with the fundamental building blocks of human life, we'd better be darn sure we know what the hell we're doing. And I'm not sure right now that we do.
