by Bryan Caplan
Law and outrage have made it hard to extend Liu’s research, but science has repeatedly overcome law and outrage before. The artificial womb probably won’t make it any easier for you to have another child but might make it easier for you to have another grandchild. Stay tuned.
USING TECHNOLOGY TO GET DIFFERENT KIDS
Mother after mother said the same thing to me: she had picked the Repository because it was the only place that let her select what she wanted.
—David Plotz, The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank
The great paradox of parenting is that we yearn to change the people we unconditionally love. Accepting our kids as they are is easier said than done. Deep down, most of us prefer to unconditionally love a certain kind of child. I’d love my sons even if they were jocks, but I want them to be nerds like me.
Today’s Typical Parents cope by trying to remold the kid they’ve got into the kid they want. Yet twin and adoption research leaves little hope for this orthodox approach. If you want to change your kids, you’d better start before conception. The low-tech method is as old as humanity itself: mate selection. Choose a partner who has the traits you want to see in your kids. Heredity is no guarantee, but it’s a mighty force of nature.
Alas, this mighty force is sometimes your enemy. What if you’ve got a genetic disease that you don’t want to pass on? Heredity is also unreliable: Your child can inherit Tay-Sachs or sickle-cell anemia even if you and your partner show no symptoms. Or what if you long for a baby girl? Sex ratio doesn’t run in families, so picking a partner with lots of sisters and no brothers won’t change your chances.
For most of human history, we had to play the genetic lottery or remain childless. Yet in recent decades, scientists have discovered new ways to rig the lottery in our favor. As they learn how to give us children, they also learn how to give us children with—or without—specific traits. These high-tech advances are another selfish reason to have more children: If you’re not quite ready to take your chances on one more kid, a little extra control over the type of kid you get should change your mind.
Once again, it’s tempting to object, “Never mind the parents. What about the welfare of the children?” But trait selection is better for kids, too. Compatibility is a two-way street: When parents get kids they really want, kids get parents who really want them. More important, trait selection reassures parents—which leads them to be more generous with the gift of life. Parents who want this control might seem depraved, but don’t be so quick to condemn them. If it’s okay to rig the genetic lottery by marrying Mr. Right, why is it wrong to rig the genetic lottery by visiting Dr. Know? If it’s okay to refuse to have any children, why is it wrong to refuse to have children of a certain kind?
In practice, people object most stridently to the idea of trait selection. They’re more open to specific practices. If two Tay-Sachs carriers use genetic screening to ensure a healthy baby, few call them monsters. Such cases are so compelling that most critics retreat to the slippery slope argument. So let’s look at specifics and see where the slippery slope leads.
GENETIC SCREENING
The simplest innovation is trait selection: Before you start a family with someone, peek at each others’ genes, then decide whether to move forward. In the future, these genetic tests might be packed with details, but for now they’re mainly used to avoid hereditary diseases. If you and your partner both carry genes for Tay-Sachs, sickle-cell anemia, or cystic fibrosis, one in four of your children will have the disorder. If you don’t like those odds, the low-tech solution is to find another partner.
Fortunately for romantics, there are two high-tech alternatives to seeing other people. The first is prenatal testing: Get pregnant, then test the fetus. The disturbing drawback is that when prenatal tests detect a problem, abortion is usually the only recourse. The second alternative is preimplantation genetic diagnosis. As long as you’re already using IVF, doctors can look at your embryos’ genes before they decide which—if any—embryos to implant. If you don’t want your children to have sickle-cell anemia, keep affected embryos away from your womb. The same goes for gender: If you want a girl, implant only female embryos.
For parents, the selfish advantages of high-tech genetic screening are plain. No one wants their children to be born with a terminal illness. The thought is enough to scare high-risk parents into childlessness. Technological reassurance makes parents better off—and entices them to create life that otherwise would not have seen the light of day.
ARTIFICIAL INSEMINATION AND EGG DONATION
Mate selection is the classic way to get the kids you want, but has one big limitation: The people with the traits you want your kids to have might not want to have kids with you. Donor sperm and eggs vastly expand your options. Only a handful of women can marry Nobel Prize winners, but in the Eighties and Nineties, Robert Graham’s “Nobel sperm bank” made it possible for any fertile woman to bear their children. His bank closed in 1999, but the vibrant industry Graham inspired now lets every woman pick a well-educated, healthy, handsome father for her children. The out-of-pocket cost is barely worth mentioning. The Fairfax Cryobank will inseminate you for $355, with a $100 upcharge for PhD sperm. If you want the donor’s personality test results, you pay another $19; for a childhood picture, add $16.
Donor eggs are far more expensive. If you use a traditional agency, expect to pay your egg donor $5,000–$10,000. In the eyes of these agencies, anything more is “unethical.” Other firms scoff at this informal price ceiling. Elite Donors’ wealthy clients typically pay ten times as much. As I write, they’re offering $75,000 for a “very attractive” donor of “proven intelligence”—ideally an Ivy League graduate, though 1350 on your SATs keeps you in the running.
Sperm and egg markets aren’t on the radar of most fertile couples. They want kids with each other, not impressive strangers. If you’re already open to sperm or egg donation, however, the bustling marketplace has much to offer. While you probably can’t afford to give your kids your ideal biological mother, you can already give them your ideal biological father for the price of an iPhone.
SPERM SORTATION
Several moms I know don’t want another kid because—their words—“It might be a boy.” While they’d like a daughter, they dread the prospect of another wild son rampaging through the house. As a boy, I could take offense, but I’d rather introduce moms to an easy, affordable way to get what they want: sperm sortation.
Sperm sortation is AI with a twist. Before implantation, doctors use a process called flow cytometry to segregate “boy sperm” and “girl sperm.” If you want a boy, sperm sortation boosts your odds to 75 percent; if you want a girl, to 90 percent. Compared to IVF, it’s cheap—about $3,000 per cycle at top U.S. clinics. If you don’t care about your child’s gender, save your money. But if you dream of playing football with your son or shopping for a wedding dress with your daughter, sperm sortation is an affordable way to make your dream much more likely to come true.
GENETIC ENGINEERING (GE)?
Twin and adoption studies show that genes affect almost every item on the Parental Wish List. Specialists can already look at embryos’ genes in order to decide which ones to implant. Only one last obstacle stands between us and so-called “designer babies”: figuring out which genes matter for each wish. Solid answers may be decades away, but human genetic engineering requires no more scientific breakthroughs—just persistence. The first customers will be wealthy eccentrics, but in a few decades, GE will be affordable and normal. Without strict government prohibition, I predict that our descendants will be amazingly smart, healthy, and accomplished.
Most people find my prediction frightening. Some paint GE as a pointless arms race; it’s individually tempting, but society is better off without it. Others object that GE would increase inequality; the rich will buy alpha babies, and the rest of us will be stuck with betas. But there’s something fishy about these complaints: If better nurture create
d a generation of wonder kids, we would rejoice. Suppose you naturally conceived an amazingly smart, healthy, and accomplished child. Would it bother you? If your neighbors had such a child, would you forbid your children to play with him? If your neighborhood were full of wonder kids, would you move away?
On my office wall, I have a picture of my dad at his high school graduation, towering a foot above his grandparents. Such height differences were common at the time because childhood nutrition improved so rapidly. I doubt that the grandparents who attended that graduation saw height as an “arms race” or griped that rich kids were even taller. They were happy to look up to their descendants—and we’d feel the same way. Deep down, even technophobes want their descendants to surpass them. They just think that picking embryos is a vile way to make it happen.
Moderate defenders of genetic engineering often distinguish between good GE that prevents disease and disability, and bad GE that increases intelligence, beauty, athletic ability, or determination. The theory is that good GE helps kids lead better lives, but bad GE merely panders to parents’ vanity. The logic is hard to see. We praise parents who nurture their kids’ health, intelligence, beauty, athletic ability, or determination because we know they’re all good traits for kids to have.
In the wrong hands, GE could admittedly do great damage. A totalitarian government could use GE to root out individuality and dissent. But if government abuse is the real danger, the smart line to draw in the sand isn’t government prohibition. It’s reproductive freedom. Insist that parents, not governments, decide if, when, and how to make babies.
The selfish advantages of GE are obvious. Parents have wishes; GE is a genie that grants them. Would you want to live in such a world? Consider the kinds of wishes most parents share: Health, intelligence, happiness, success, character, appreciation. Who doesn’t hope that the future holds more of these? If you fear a gray uniformity, remember that most parents also yearn to transmit their controversial values to the next generation. As long as parents have reproductive freedom, then, GE will help preserve diversity of religion, politics, tradition, and interests. Our descendants will be more impressive and fortunate than us, but they’ll still disagree on the Big Questions and the Good Life.
THE CASE OF CLONING
Should we not assert as a principle that any so-called great man who did consent to be cloned should on that basis be disqualified, as possessing too high an opinion of himself and of his genes? Can we stand an increase in arrogance?
—Leon Kass, “Making Babies—the New Biology and the ‘Old’ Morality”
If reproductive progress is so great, why not allow human cloning? Over 85 percent of Americans—and 100 percent of George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics—favor a ban. But frankly, laymen and experts need to be more open-minded. Reproductive advances almost always disgust us—until we see the life and hope they bring.
If you think clones are contrary to nature, think twice. Identical twins are naturally occurring clones—two humans who have all their genes in common. Since clones already walk among us, we don’t have to idly philosophize about the psychological and social dangers of cloning. We can look—and see that cloning’s opponents don’t know what they’re talking about. The Council on Bioethics warns, “A cloned child . . . is at risk of living out a life overshadowed in important ways by the life of the ‘original.’” Yet identical twins rarely agonize over their supposed lack of individuality. Instead, they feel grateful for their special bond. When people ask how my identical twin sons get along, I answer, “I’ve never seen anything like it. They are literally ‘brotherly.’”
Unlike most opponents of cloning, at least the Council on Bioethics tries to explain why cloning is worse than twinning:Identical twins . . . are born together, before either one has developed and shown what his or her potential—natural or otherwise—may be. Each is largely free of the burden of measuring up to or even knowing in advance the genetic traits of the other . . . But a clone is a genetic near-copy of a person who is already living or has already lived . . . Everything about the predecessor . . . will appear before the expectant eyes of the cloned person, always with at least the nagging concern that there, notwithstanding the grace of God, go I.
Even if this were true, life with a mild inferiority complex remains much better than no life at all. But the council’s “measuring up” argument actually shows that clones have a lighter cross to bear than twins. Suppose two identical twins grow up together. If one is less successful than the other, what’s his excuse? With the same genes, upbringing, place, and time, personal responsibility is almost inescapable. An underachieving clone, in contrast, can always plausibly tell his predecessor, “I grew up in a totally different era; the rules changed; the world doesn’t work the way it did when you were my age.”
You could say that human cloning is so far in the future that selfishly speaking, we might as well ignore it. I’m more optimistic. Look at how far IVF has come over the last four decades. In twenty years, cloning might be a great option for infertile women in their forties and fifties. Even if it takes centuries to perfect the process, though, the idea of cloning challenges our prejudices. If it is good to create human life, why is it bad to create it in an unfamiliar way?
BETTER LIVING THROUGH BIOLOGY
When my wife and I told the world that we were expecting twins, the standard reaction was, “Oh, did you use fertility treatments?” Total strangers weren’t afraid to ask. I was surprised but took no offense. The nosy questions helped me appreciate the full value of applied reproductive science. It has given life to millions of children, and children to millions of parents—and undermined the age-old stigma of infertility in its spare time.
We can’t yet make everyone fertile, or every child healthy, but we’re getting there. You’d think the whole world would be celebrating the triumphs of life-giving science and adding, “The best is yet to come.” We’re not. People whose lives have been touched by advances in reproductive technology are grateful, but bystanders keep looking the gift horse in the mouth: “It’s touching to see new parents holding a ‘miracle baby’ in their arms, but what about the broader consequences? What about the welfare of the children, the threat to our humanity, the exploitation of surrogates, the commodification of life?”
But the broader consequences of scientific progress do not take away from its glory. They add to it. Here is the quick and dirty case for past, present, and future advances in reproductive technology:1. It is good to exist. The clearest beneficiary of any life-giving technology is the child himself, who will almost certainly be glad to be alive. Aren’t you? Miracle babies have no reason to love their lives any less.
2. Trade is mutually beneficial. Sperm donors, egg donors, and surrogates are not victims. They are consenting adults who help others for a mixture of meaning and profit, just like doctors, teachers, engineers, and chefs. Low-income donors and surrogates aren’t “exploited.” By their standards, they have great jobs that let them build better lives for themselves and their families.
3. Third parties gain, too. In the long run, higher population makes us richer, not poorer. In the words of Julian Simon, human minds are “the ultimate resource.” Progress depends on new ideas, and new ideas come from people. Yes, it’s conceivable that a baby will grow up to be the next Hitler. The very existence of civilization shows, however, that the average baby grows up to be a creator, not a destroyer.
Like Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, the opponents of reproductive technology are quick to call others arrogant and reckless. They should look in the mirror. Their stubborn search for dark linings in every silver cloud reeks of arrogance. Who are they to grumble against technologies to which millions of families owe their children—and millions of children owe their lives? But the opponents’ intolerance is even worse than their pessimism. They don’t want to persuade others to avoid “unnatural” technologies. They want to turn their flimsy complaints into worldwide bans. Since they would rather be childless th
an resort to AI, IVF, surrogacy, or cloning, everyone on earth should be forced to make the same choice. If that isn’t reckless and arrogant, what is?
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BE FRUITFUL AND MULTIPLY: FOUR CHATS ON KIDS, PARENTING, HAPPINESS, AND SELF-INTEREST
Excepting suicide, the most serious decision in life should be to have a child; however, not to have a child, if one is capable of having children, should perhaps be an even more serious decision.
—Thomas Szasz, The Untamed Tongue
THE BEST WAY TO UNDERSTAND A POSITION IS TO ARGUE ON ITS behalf. You learn as you speak. Sometimes you find that objections are stronger than you realized; other times you discover that they’re weaker than they looked. You may end up abandoning the position—or improving it and returning to the fray. Critics don’t just keep you honest; they show you the light.
Now that you’ve heard my main arguments, it’s time to wrestle with some critics. The following exchanges are admittedly staged. I’m the only real character; the rest are composites. But each represents a popular reaction to my position, and all the arguments are drawn from life.