When I first started writing on the internet in the early aughts times were different. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) was more science fiction than a topic which touched the realm of reality. Yes, there was screening for a handful of classic recessive diseases, and somewhere Leon Kass was reflecting upon human dignity being undermined by the very idea of PGD with all the clarity of Martin Heidegger ruminating upon Being. But really this was a speculative period, when we were test driving arguments, positions, and talking points. I believe most of us understood that we were rehearsing for the true battles which would erupt at the center of modern civilization with the rise of biological engineering.
The era of test-driving arguments is over when you see articles by Gina Kolata about real people in The New York Times. Ethics Questions Arise as Genetic Testing of Embryos Increases:
On the spot, Ms. Baxley, 26, declared she would not let the disease take another life in her family line, even if that meant forgoing childbirth. “I want it stopped,” she said. The next day, her boyfriend, Bradley Kalinsky, asked her to marry him.
But the Kalinskys’ wedded life has taken a completely unexpected turn, one briefly described on Monday in The Journal of the American Medical Association Neurology. Like a growing number of couples who know a disease runs in the family, they chose in vitro fertilization, and had cells from the embryos, created in a petri dish with her eggs and his sperm, tested first for the disease-causing gene. Only embryos without the gene were implanted. The Kalinskys are now parents of three children who will be free of the fear of GSS.
The subject of the story is still likely to die at some point during or before her 50s. And, that process of death may span as much as two decades. So the disease, and the couple’s choice to have children, is not without consequences which are less than optimal. But the bottom-line for me is that the decision made here was fundamentally a noncontroversial pro-life act. In the face of the darkness of a potential terminal diagnosis this woman and her husband have brought forth life, and as a new father I truly know in my bones the joy of that as I never would have before. But this isn’t a human interest piece, much of the article is given over to the vague and to be expected platitudes from ethicists. There is “trouble.” The implications are “unsettling.” To me these sorts of talking points have all the power of “think of the children” as an argument against interracial marriage. You can see where they’re coming from, and it’s nowhere substantive.
I assume that professional ethicists not constantly being interviewed by high profile journalists have opinions which aren’t easily condensed into one sentence triteness. Or perhaps more fairly that’s just what gets distilled from a long interview. But I’m rather sick and tired of ethicists being “troubled,” and also fed up with reductio ad absurdum arguments. At one point Kolata paraphrases one of her sources as saying: “Eliminating embryos with such genes is essentially saying someone like Ms. Kalinsky should never have been born.” What does that even mean?
To truly get to the heart of these questions we have to ask deep philosophical questions about the nature of one’s own existence, being, and identity. Obviously that’s not appropriate fare for The New York Times, which seems to be cautious about treading beyond its core milquetoast mildly liberal reading audience. The sorts who are self-satisfied in their unexamined enlightenment received from on-middlebrow. But PGD and the assorted technologies of the mass applied biology of the first few decades of this century will force us as a society to elucidate once more what we truly believe the good life is. What is the life worth living? Is it truly just the lives which parents deign worth living? Society? Gods on high? These are the real questions which strike at the heart of the matter, and the sooner we get to them, the sooner we’ll achieve our unsatisfying resolutions.
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