The ethical dilemma of a ‘perfect’ child, and the eugenic undertones of the IVF industry

A woman in California has brought designer babies back into the spotlight by admitting that she only wants daughters and explaining the lengths she went to to ensure she didn’t have a son — including spending $30,000 on IVF despite having no fertility issues.

Faith Hartley told The Times she wanted two daughters. In her ideal world, one would be blonde like her and one would be a redhead like her husband, Neil Robertson. After conceiving their first daughter naturally and seeing her red hair, Hartley soon decided she wanted daughter number two.

The Times explained:

A boy was not on the agenda. And through Californian mom friends she discovered that if she chose in vitro fertilisation (IVF) in the state she could pick the sex of her child — one of the very few places in the world where this is legal. Hartley, in her sprawling home of sparkling white marble countertops, fur throws and pink roses, was thrilled. She was undeterred by the cost. In fact she hoped you could pick other traits too. ‘I thought, we have one redhead, let’s have a blonde. But my doctor said you can’t do that — yet. So then we were, like, OK, we’ll just have the girl.’

One round of IVF at Southern California Reproductive Center created daughter, Bardot, who was born with strawberry blonde hair. It likely also created numerous other children who are either frozen or were destroyed.

“It was perfect,” Hartley said. “Bardot has my features, so I have my mini-me and Neil has his [daughter Aspen]. So I got what I wanted in the end.”

That’s what children have become, thanks to the fertility industry — products someone wants. Under that notion, who wouldn’t expect their money to buy the desired product with their preferred attributes?

A booming business

According to The Times, California’s nearly regulation-free fertility industry is “booming.” It’s where the wealthy elites of the world go to shell out the cash to build their family. Commercialized surrogacy, egg ‘donation,’ sperm ‘donation,’ sex selection, and even eye color selection are all legal. Surrogacy can cost upwards of $100,000 while egg donors charge up to $150,000 and sperm donors $5,000. Choosing available features for your child costs $30,000. The shock doesn’t stop at the price.

There is so much demand for these “services” in California that there are 92 clinics and an offshoot industry of fertility “concierges” who offer services from shipping breast milk to organizing two surrogates to be pregnant at once so a couple can have ‘twins.’

Testing at some clinics can analyze an embryo’s predisposition to 600 plus diseases and health conditions — ensuring the embryos deemed unfit are discarded. But the sky’s the limit in the U.S., where no regulation has been passed regarding the screening of embryos for anything.

If a couple is willing to pay the cost, what’s stopping big fertility from fulfilling their requests for their perception of a perfect child?

Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg is a fertility doctor in Los Angeles, and 90% of his clients do not have fertility problems. Most of them come from countries where selecting your embryo by gender or physical trait is prohibited. Steinberg is popular in part because he boasts a 92% accuracy rate in predicting the eye color of a child.

“But we are learning that there are five different shades of blue, because parents might call up with a five-year-old and say, ‘Well, this isn’t quite the blue we were thinking about,’” he said.

“[Eventually,] we’ll have the whole genetic profile of everything,” he said.

READ: Disturbing story exposes egg donation process for surrogacy agency in China

The ethical dilemma of a ‘perfect’ child

Not everyone is on board with such in-depth genetic selection. Harry J. Lieman, MD, and Andrzej K. Breborowicz, MD, PhD, wrote for the AMA Journal of Ethics, “The subject of sex selection generates mixed views, given its medical, ethical, and, potentially, societal implications. … The slippery slope concern is also raised as an argument against elective sex selection: once the threshold of applying the technology for one nonessential indication is crossed, there is reason to believe we will not stop at sex and will seek to select other non-health-related traits in embryos.”

They added that there is limited data on how biopsies of embryos can negatively affect them in the future.

“There’s no reason to think polygenic embryo screening will end with conditions like heart disease and diabetes,” said Katie Hasson, associate director of the Center for Genetics and Society. “Screening for schizophrenia and other mental illnesses is already on offer. These directly echo eugenic efforts to eliminate ‘feeble-mindedness.’ We are talking about deciding who should be born based on ‘good’ and ‘bad’ genes.”

The Alabama Supreme Court decision that deemed frozen embryos should be considered children under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act put a spotlight on the lack of regulations in the U.S. fertility industry. The case centered around embryos that were destroyed and the parents who sued over that destruction of life. Yet, the media and many politicians claimed the ruling would shut down IVF clinics despite zero regulations being placed on them by the ruling. It simply said parents could sue clinics if their embryonic children were killed against their wishes. But the fertility industry is keenly aware that it kills human embryos at a higher rate than induced abortion — genetically testing each of them and destroying those who don’t make the cut. The fertility clinics became afraid of being sued.

Embryo destruction is so common in IVF that there’s no question what would happen to embryos with brown eyes whose parents wanted embryos with blue eyes. Their likely premature deaths set the stage for a society in which certain physical traits are preferred over others to the point at which some persons are considered unworthy simply because of their eye color.

“I am concerned culturally for when the line between testing [embryos] for disease and testing for enhancements gets fuzzy,” said Arthur Caplan, professor of bioethics at New York University. “We can’t test reliably for height, intelligence, athletic skill or personality type, but those tests might emerge in the future and they will do so in a business environment.”

The future of child-making has begun

What Caplan is ignoring, however, is that unethical practices are already taking place in the fertility industry. Destroying embryos for having cystic fibrosis or Down syndrome is the same as destroying embryos for having brown eyes or not having the makings of an NBA All-Star. It’s all discrimination. It’s all eugenics.

Right now, Gail Sexton Anderson is a sought-after “egg seeker” who hunts down “egg donors” for entitled clients looking for specific traits. “I want to help people find what they want,” she said. “Everybody is entitled to have what’s important to them.”

What’s important to a child is a parent’s love and an understanding of who they are as a person. According to a Harvard University study, 62% of children conceived through donor technologies, including surrogacy, believe it to be unethical and immoral. IVF also carries risks for women and children. But there seems to be little concern for this.

“There is little impulse to regulate this area of reproduction because the rich want services, the private sector can deliver them and the US isn’t set up to enforce bans on commercialized reproduction,” Caplan explained. “I think that we will eventually go into eugenic use.”

We are already there. Right now in the U.S., politicians are clamoring over which presidential candidate is more supportive of and will do more financially for prospective parents opting for IVF. The idea of a “designer baby” has been around for decades as science fiction. Now it’s all too real and the government appears to have no plans of regulating the industry any time soon.

As Steinburg says, “Don’t ever put handcuffs on a scientist.”

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