Designer Babies and the Pro-Choice Movement
Tuhus-Dubrow, Rebecca
0VER THE LAST CENTURY, the link between sex and reproduction has weakened. Feminist activism, aided by technological advances, has given middle-class women in the United States...
...One effort was a retreat in October 2006 with representatives from various progressive organizations, including Planned Parenthood, Choice USA, the ACLU, the disability rights group Not Dead Yet, and the LGBT Community Center of New York...
...THE FIRST AND least controversial task for pro-choice activists, then, is to make it very clear that the rights for which they have fought are fundamentally different from the right to determine the genetic makeup of DISSENT / Summer 2007 n 4 1 DESIGNER BABIES offspring...
...I spoke to staff at the GLBT (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered) Community Center in New York, who said that to the extent that it helps them have genetically related families, they welcome the technology...
...Hirschman argued that women, with the goal of collective advancement in mind, ought to aggressively pursue high-power, high-paying positions...
...There's no easy answer...
...There is a lot of messy overlap between reproductive rights and what could emerge as a neo-eugenics: both benefit from the separation of sex and reproduction and both entail increased "choice...
...Now, more parents use it to screen out genes for late-onset, treatable diseases, such as colon cancer...
...Pro-choice advocates already find themselves associated with advocates of this "reprogenetic" technology, who often appropriate pro-choice language...
...By 1919, Sanger's far-left political background was a liability in a climate hostile to radicalism...
...If only, or primarily, out of pure nostalgia, a lot of us bristle at the prospect...
...CURRENTLY, THE pro-choice movement is under siege to a greater degree than any time since 1973, a situation that has led it to reassess its strategy...
...It appears inevitable that genetic technologies of all kinds will become one of the major issues of this century...
...Today's variety technically does the opposite: the technologies offer more choices...
...A nurse with working-class origins, she saw firsthand the travails of poor women drained physically and financially by endless births...
...mainstream players in the Democratic Party, such as George Lakoff, a linguist and consultant...
...Initially, preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) targeted severe childhood diseases, such as Tay-Sachs and sickle cell anemia...
...But now that they do, promoting sensible policies on their use should fit into a broader platform...
...Efforts to rethink the conventional approach are evident in the work of Frances Kissling, former president of Catholics for a Free Choice...
...The "new eugenics" is in many ways the opposite of its predecessor...
...the struggle was to avoid having them...
...Another was the alienation of poor minority women...
...What is a "designer baby" but a new consumer choice...
...Qualms on the left include the potential exacerbation of inequalities, the eugenic overtones, and the environmental implications of meddling with nature...
...In fact, of the reproductive rights activists I've spoken to, Ross was the most sympathetic to the prospect of regulating these technologies...
...The United Kingdom has the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HFEA), which licenses and monitors all fertility clinics...
...Many countries, mostly in Europe, but also Canada, Australia, and Trinidad and Tobago have passed laws or regulations restricting or proscribing various kinds of genetic modifications...
...because sometimes bringing a child into the world is the wrong thing to do...
...At the same time, the eugenics movement was seen as socially responsible and forward-thinking by the public and many intellectuals...
...Many people instinctively react against the idea of tinkering with genetics...
...Many feminists are troubled by sex selection, but fear that regulating any aspect of reproduction could jeopardize abortion rights...
...Reproductive technologies did not factor into the original movement, because they didn't yet exist...
...The concept of reproductive justice has already made inroads into the mainstream movement...
...2) the right not to have a child...
...on the other hand, parents who choose to forgo these measures could be seen as negligent...
...Responses and Political Possibilities This issue creates strange bedmates...
...On the defensive against a passionately committed (and sometimes murderous) anti-abortion movement, many feminists focused more intensively on abortion, shifting energy away from other goals, such as child care, maternity leave, and support for alternative sexual lifestyles...
...as well as many other feminists and activists...
...Choice rhetoric has seeped into other aspects of feminism as well, with mixed results...
...Her article focused on the "mommy wars" debate, but the same rationale can apply to other aspects of female life...
...Meanwhile, a burgeoning fertility industry has, for thousands, taken babymaking from the bedroom to the laboratory...
...It's about Reproductive Rights, Stupid," reads the title of an article on the Web site betterhumans.com , which promotes the use of biotechnologies to improve the human species...
...Legal scholars predict that when the question of selecting the traits of offspring inevitably arrives in court, it will be considered in this framework...
...In the aftermath of the Webster v. Reproductive Health Services Supreme Court decision (1989), which upheld a Missouri statute prohibiting the use of public facilities for abortions, NARAL launched its successful "Who Decides...
...Planned Parenthood and NARAL opposed the restrictions, arguing that they infringed on reDESIGNER BABIES productive freedom...
...Nowhere will this tension be more conspicuous than in the reproductive rights movement...
...that was a matter of individual conscience...
...REBECCA TUHUS-DUBROW is a journalist based in Brooklyn...
...Sanger believed that birth control— legally restricted at the time—was all but a panacea for society's ills...
...A feminism that consecrates individual choices, endorsing them all as equally valid, has lost its mission and its soul...
...Linda Hirschman caused a stir in 2005 with an article in the American Prospect decrying "choice feminism"—the notion that staying home with the kids is as feminist as working, provided that it's the woman's "choice...
...Although not currently one of the main items on the reproductive justice agenda, a position on reprogenetic technologies can easily be added to the list of concerns, which include environmental hazards and health care...
...Margaret Sanger, the tireless pioneer of birth control in the United States, started out in the early twentieth century as a radical socialist and feminist...
...Concerns about reprogenetics have also surfaced...
...As Kate Michelman, until recently NARAL's president, recalls in her 2005 book, With Liberty and Justice for All, "The issue was not whether abortion was morally right or wrong...
...Now, we who support abortion rights may fear that regulating reproductive technologies could endanger our cause...
...Yet, in a culture in which health and beauty are increasingly conflated, as are treatments and enhancements (as more natural variation is pathologized), these distinctions are exceedingly difficult to make...
...They shouldn't be left, as they currently are, entirely to the market...
...Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., famously wrote, "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind . . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough...
...3) the right to parent the children we have . . . . We also fight for the necessary enabling conditions to realize these rights...
...It appears equally inevitable that the pro-choice movement will become entangled in the debate...
...In vitro fertilization (IVF) does not merely help the infertile to procreate...
...reproductive justice" advocates, including Loretta Ross...
...The gene is not even certain to cause the disease...
...While I personally believe in the sterilization of the feebleminded, the insane and the syphiletic [sic]," she wrote in 1919, "I have not been able to discover that these measures are more than superficial deterrents when applied to the constantly growing stream of the unfit...
...The Planned Parenthood conference devoted a quarter of the agenda to reproductive technologies...
...Feminist activism, aided by technological advances, has given middle-class women in the United States widespread access to effective contraception and safe, legal abortion...
...The racial component of reproductive politics has been analyzed by scholars such as Dorothy Roberts in Killing the Black Body and Jennifer Nelson in Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement...
...The relevant legal infrastructure adds another complication...
...In the rural South, sterilizations of black women—often performed without their knowledge following childbirth, abortion, or other operations—were known as the "Mississippi appendectomy," a term coined by Fannie Lou Hamer to describe her own...
...DISSENT / Summer 2007 • 43...
...Genetic engineering, which will enable not merely the selection but the insertion of desired genes, is on the horizon...
...Disability activists are wary of technologies that essentially aim to eliminate their community...
...At the same time, economic libertarians oppose regulation of this three-billion-dollarayear industry, and a fringe of neo-eugenicists wants to create a super race...
...Legal issues aside, in the court of public opinion reproductive rights may be conflated with a libertarian view on genetic technologies...
...The aim was to ensure informed consent, because so many poor minority women had been sterilized without it, in haste...
...The court decisions that uphold rights valued by progressives could also afford protection to the right to design babies...
...campaign, which toned down the women's liberation language and focused on the right to freedom from government intervention...
...and form coalitions with other segments of the left...
...move away from a single-issue focus on abortion toward a more comprehensive agenda...
...The common political assumption is that conservatives would oppose the potentially radical change promised by reprogenetic technologies, while liberals would embrace the scientific progress they represent...
...University of Texas law professor John Robertson has defended the use of reprogenetic technologies on the grounds of "procreative liberty" His argument goes like this: people have the right to procreate...
...And the original eugenics also included a "positive" element: encouraging "fit families" to breed...
...The pro-choice movement eludes generalization, because different organizations have different priorities and approaches, but many parts of it have already begun to shift toward a social justice focus and a broader platform...
...Abortion was less of a priority for women struggling with multiple reproductive challenges: environmental hazards, lack of health care and child care, the fear of coerced sterilization...
...Some women assert that anything from wearing lipstick to topless dancing can be a feminist act, because a woman is empowered by her choice to perform it...
...The movement triumphed with Roe v. Wade...
...White women, who frequently could not persuade doctors to sterilize them, did not want to make the process more cumbersome...
...To advance the latter goal, some eugenicists advocated sterilization, by force, if necessary...
...Likewise, Margaret Sanger was so single-minded in the promotion of her cause that she endorsed wrongheaded ideas that she believed would serve it...
...It is even more difficult to imagine how they would be regulated...
...In the literature of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective, the national coordinator, Loretta Ross, defines the term, coined in 1994, as "(1) the right to have a child...
...In the United States, this rapidly advancing technology is unchecked by any regulatory mechanism...
...Today's version is "positive": it allows for the creation of more desirable babies...
...Even without the borrowed buzzwords, the pro-choice movement would be uneasily close to the issue...
...In contemplating regulation, an example from the past might prove illuminating...
...Ariel Levy discusses this phenomenon in her book Female Chauvinist Pigs...
...The opposition of the mainstream groups was understandable, but it also reflected a degree of myopia...
...She had promoted birth control for the poor because she saw that they suffered most for the lack of it...
...Abortion should be legal because women should have the same rights as men to shape their lives...
...The more meaningful distinction is that the original eugenics involved coercion, depriving people of their rights and liberties...
...because without legal abortion, women suffer and die...
...It is also the most authentic position of the reproductive freedom movement itself...
...Mainstream feminists wanted the choice not to have children, to be emancipated from the constraints of the traditional female role...
...in fact, it has dogged the movement since its early days...
...We have to find a way to advance that multifaceted program, including views on reproductive technologies, while protecting the right to abortion...
...Although arguably a political necessity at the time, focusing on abortion and adopting an individual liberties paradigm had its costs...
...Assessing the "New Eugenics" Eugenics is a bad word, and "designer baby" is a term the media use to conjure science fiction dystopias, but is it really wrong to use new technologies to improve the human species...
...According to a 2006 survey conducted by the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University, 42 percent of 137 IVFPGD clinics allowed parents to select for gender...
...Eugenicists argued that society would benefit if families with "good genes" reproduced prolifically, while the "unfit" refrained from procreating...
...Of course, the recent decision in Gonzalez v. Carhart raises questions about the durability of these liberties under the current Supreme Court...
...Princeton professor Lee Silver has outlined a nightmarish scenario in which an essentially new species evolves: "The GenRich class and the Natural class will become entirely separate species with no ability to crossbreed, and with as much romantic interest in each other as a current human would have for a chimpanzee...
...Like it or not, pro-choice groups, then, will be compelled to take a stand...
...sometimes the choice whether to procreate depends on the qualities of the prospective offspring...
...Although progressives welcome these freedoms, the implications for the unfettered use of reprogenetic technologies are disturbing...
...Colon cancer is a late-onset, treatable disease...
...Clearly, there is great potential for good as well as harm in these technologies...
...Where, and how, do we draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable...
...In 1975, in New York, a multiracial coalition called the Advisory Committee on Sterilization helped implement guidelines for regulating sterilization, including a mandatory waiting period...
...The pro-choice advocates in particular started a process of reflection on the tensions— between individual liberties and social justice—that are especially prominent in their movement...
...This early association, along with certain government policies, helped to taint birth control and abortion in the eyes of many minorities...
...Plenty of poor white people suffered under eugenic policies, but black, Hispanic, and indigenous women were targeted disproportionately...
...It will emerge as an important political issue, complicated by competing values, such as individual liberty and social equality...
...How can they justify the expenditure and the godlike control they've assumed...
...The Center for Genetics and Society, billed as "a pro-choice organization working for sensible policies on genetic engineering technology," aims to initiate and facilitate conversations about the subject...
...Further, Lawrence v. Texas (2003), hailed by the left for striking down sodomy laws, dramatically limits the ability of government to restrict personal decisions "absent injury to a person or abuse of an institution the law protects...
...One was the loss of a compelling moral narrative, which left a vacuum for the anti-abortion side to fill...
...Or, we may feel comfortable with treatment, but not enhancement...
...The landmark Supreme Court cases Connecticut v. Griswold (1965) and Roe v. Wade (1973) recognized the right of individuals to control their reproductive destinies...
...increasingly, it allows parents to determine the genetic makeup of their offspring...
...Abortion-rights advocates can frame abortion as a matter of social justice, not just of freedom from government interference...
...The literature of Choice USA, a fifteenyearold organization founded by Gloria Steinem, uses the term reproductive justice, and Planned Parenthood sponsored a conference in 2005 at Smith College titled "Reproductive Justice for All...
...Drawing this distinction could lead to another step: emphasizing the morality of abortion rights...
...Fears ran deep that contraception and abortion, as well as sterilization, were means of controlling, if not eliminating, these communities...
...This applies to all of the major cases affirming the right to contraception and abortion: Griswold and Roe, but also Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972), which recognized the right of unmarried people to use contraception, and even Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which allowed some restrictions on abortion but reiterated the essential right of people to make decisions regarding reproduction...
...1\4EANWHILE, THE mainstream prochoice movement was operating from a vastly different perspective...
...In the 1960s and 1970s, abortion rights activists framed the debate in terms of feminism DESIGNER BABIES and sexual liberation...
...Pro-choice activists have struggled for women's freedom to control their own lives and bodies, not to control the lives and bodies of their children...
...As Joffe pointed out in the Dissent article mentioned earlier, "the logic of seeing abortion as just one part of the mosaic of reproductive and sexual rights and services is not simply that it is persuasive to others...
...Less certain, but plausible, is that scientists will be able to identify genes for more complex traits, such as intelligence and homosexuality...
...On a less existentially threatening but disturbing note, Annas and others have also predicted an "arms race" among relatively affluent parents: added to pressure to enroll kids in the most prestigious preschools will be pressure to provide them with the best DESIGNER BABIES genes...
...The question was, who had the right to decide—women or the government...
...And here is where the reprogenetic technologies fit in...
...On the other hand, their family has suffered immensely from this disease, and they want to ensure that their child avoids that suffering...
...When a vague, distorted feminism is conflated with enthusiastic consumerism, when "choice" is the catchword of both, designer babies can easily emerge as the natural, if not inevitable, next step in the evolution of our liberated, capitalist society, in which choices will continue to multiply for consumers—especially for those consumers par excellence, women...
...Although I don't agree with everything Hirschman wrote—for instance, that we should eschew low-paying, socially beneficial work in favor of cutthroat corporate success— I think she was onto something...
...When she embraced eugenics, her rhetoric adapted easily to the values of the movement...
...and would-be presidential nominee Hillary Clinton...
...If the technology is available, and they choose to spend their money on it, how can we deprive them of that option...
...This conflict was perhaps the clearest manifestation of the discordant outlooks of different feminists...
...But if a "gay gene" is ever identified, their communities, too, could be threatened...
...This more comprehensive notion of reproductive justice can be useful in confronting the issue of designer babies...
...Birth control, on the other hand, not only opens the way to the eugenist [sic], but it preserves his work...
...And indeed, the religious right, concerned about the embryo and the blasphemy of playing God, condemns them, while some liberals are more inclined to welcome them on the grounds of "progress"—and, perhaps, in opposition to "culture of life" priorities...
...Legally, those are the terms that define reproductive rights...
...Numerous state laws were enacted to authorize forced sterilization...
...When the government funded birth control rather than health care or child care in poor communities, some activists angrily pointed out that reducing the number of poor people was not the same as reducing poverty...
...Many people condone health-related genetic tinkering, but not a cosmetic kind...
...Scientists predict that parents will be able to choose such characteristics as blue eyes or curly hair...
...According to Sujatha Jesudason of the Center for Genetics and Society, the groups that attended that retreat were enthusiastic about continuing the conversations within their own organizations and forming coalitions to address the issue...
...therefore, enhancement must be permitted (although he endorses limited restrictions...
...A couple profiled in the New York Times underwent elective in vitro fertilization—even though they could likely have conceived without it—in order to choose an embryo without a gene that would predispose their child to colon cancer...
...DISSENT / Summer 2007 n 37 DESIGNER BABIES The Twentieth Century The link between reproductive rights and eugenics is not new...
...Sanger's poor patients begged her for the secrets of the rich...
...William Saletan has analyzed the campaign in his book Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War...
...Granted, it could be interpreted as negative because, at this stage, it involves discarding "unfit" embryos...
...Rarely did white women have to fight to have children...
...In the following decades, some strands of the mainstream pro-choice movement, notably NARAL (then known as the National Abortion Rights Action League), modified their approach in the face of changing political realities...
...Such a platform could appeal to other factions of the left as well as moderates, who might be turned off 42 n DISSENT / Summer 2007 by the focus on abortion but who share concerns about related issues, including the abuse of reprogenetic technologies...
...This example leads us down the slippery 40 n DISSENT / Summer 2007 slope...
...They will have to distinguish their concept of reproductive rights from that advanced by neo-eugenicists and to decide whether and how to endorse regulation of reproductive technologies without jeopardizing already tenuous rights...
...There are several possible criticisms of their decision...
...Indeed, some proponents of their use accuse "bio-Luddites" of being the true descendants of eugenicists—for proposing state interference in the arena, for seeking to circumscribe the full range of available "reproductive choices...
...Choice feminism" is uncomfortably close to the ethos of DISSENT / Summer 2007 n 39 DESIGNER BABIES consumer culture...
...It evokes fears of playing God, of technological experimentation gone horribly awry, even of the end of humanity as we know it...
...sex selection is also popular...
...Approached on the level of specifics, however, the questions appear more complicated...
...By the time the child is an adult, a cure may be found...
...But along with these challenges come opportunities...
...But individual choices can have larger social consequences...
...Now, some supporters of abortion rights want to move beyond the stagnant terms of the debate...
...Although far too many exceptions persist, for large numbers of women, sex today has no necessary relationship to childbearing...
...AS AN ALTERNATIVE to "choice," women of color have created the concept of "reproductive justice...
...There is no doubt that maintaining the legality of abortion—and fighting to reverse harmful restrictions of it—is paramount...
...But it is also important for us to sustain a larger moral vision...
...Whether the latter right is legitimate or not, it is not the same as or an extension of the former...
...In this new challenge, Margaret Sanger provides an instructive example—today's reproductive-rights advocates should emulate her passionate advocacy and avoid repeating her mistakes...
...Indeed, "choice feminism" is Hirschman's term, not a movement with an agenda...
...The United States is lagging in this regard...
...In an attempt to gain the imprimatur of science, and in a move that has since haunted her legacy, Sanger became associated with the eugenics movement...
...In the 1960s and 1970s, the Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam both denounced birth control as genocidal...
...This option was presented as a humane alternative: the "dysgenic" would not have to be permanently institutionalized or even remain celibate to avoid propagating their undesirable genes...
...Some of those who wanted abortions couldn't afford to pay for them, so the freedom from government intervention was inadequate...
...All of these had once been integral parts of the feminist pro-choice agenda, as Carole Joffe discussed in these pages ("It's Not Just Abortion, Stupid," Winter 2005...
...Forced sterilization received Supreme Court approval in Buck v. Bell (1927...
...Other progressive contingents have their worries...
...She launched a crusade, even subordinating other values to the cause: during World War I, for example, she kept quiet about her pacifist beliefs out of fear that her unpopular opinion would undermine support for birth control...
...Recent documents, such as Beyond Choice, a 2004 book by Alexander Sanger, grandson of Margaret and chair of the International Planned Parenthood Council, and More than a Choice, a 2006 paper by the Center for American Progress, reflect this attitude...
...but some women do subscribe to the idea...
...The term "choice" itself has come under scrutiny, often criticized as a problematic concept and a weak and morally flaccid competitor with "life...
...It's time for a society-wide conversation about their use and abuse...
...The well-off always managed to procure means for control38 n DISSENT / Summer 2007 ling their fertility...
...British author Nicholas Agar, in his recent book Liberal Eugenics, writes, "The eugenics defended here [is] primarily concerned with the protection and extension of reproductive freedom...
...Thus can the concept of reproductive choice be appropriated and abused...
...The result could be an increased tendency to see children as commodities and status markers...
...Others, such as bioethicist George Annas, have worried that such a scenario could undermine the notion of human rights, which is based on a concept of our shared humanity...
...The original eugenics was largely "negative": its goal was to curtail the population growth of the "unfit," often through involuntary, state-sanctioned, sometimes state-funded sterilization...
...Other groups, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, also harbored suspicions...
...By incorporating concerns about the abuse of reproductive technologies into a pro-choice platform, the movement can shift away from an individual-liberties paradigm toward a social justice orientation...
...Gay and lesbian people have an especially complex relationship to assisted reproductive technology...
...Historically, pro-choice arguments have focused on the right to privacy and freedom from government interference...
Vol. 54 • July 2007 • No. 3
