by Jamie Metzl
In the years following Roe v. Wade, the Catholic Church and evangelical Christians rallied against abortion with increasing intensity, eventually gaining the political support of America’s Republican Party. Although the Roe decision held and abortion rights remained protected in more liberal states like California and New York, pressures to restrict abortion intensified in more conservative U.S. states. In the forty years after Roe, nearly 300 violent attacks, including arson and bombings, were carried out against abortion clinics, and abortion providers were even murdered across the United States.43 The National Abortion Federation additionally reported over 176,000 incidents of abortion clinics being picketed over the past four decades, 1,500 acts of vandalism, and 400 death threats.44 As a result of these types of pressures and the 1977 Hyde Amendment that significantly restricted the use of federal funds for abortion, today 84 percent of U.S. counties provide no abortion services, and only seventeen U.S. states fund abortions on terms similar to other health services.45
In China, the Communist party quickly banned most abortions after coming to power in 1949 to spur population growth. But after taking over in 1978 following Mao’s death and a power struggle, Deng Xiaoping believed his economic reform plans could only work if China’s population growth could be slowed. His government launched the one-child policy in 1979, limiting most Han Chinese families, particularly those in urban areas, to a single child. In support of this policy, China legalized abortion in 1988.
Over the following nearly four decades the one-child policy was in force, most families that had more than one child were heavily fined and a large number of women were forced to have abortions and/or be sterilized without their consent.46 The one-child policy eased any stigma surrounding abortion and encouraged many parents, sometimes inadvertently and sometimes directly, to abort female embryos, place female babies for adoption, and abandon children born with disabilities. Although the one-child policy was finally eased in 2015, the policy subtracted around four hundred million people from China’s otherwise predicted population growth.47
But even with government pressure relaxed, the Chinese public remained on average considerably more comfortable with abortion than their American counterparts. Unlike Western religions that traditionally ascribe humanity as a divine creation, the Chinese tend to see themselves as descendants of their own parents, a foundation of the ancient rite of ancestor worship. These ideas also underpin the Confucian concept of filial piety, a major foundation of Chinese culture, which highly values producing healthy and capable offspring to carry on the family legacy. Today, abortion remains widely accepted in China.
Around the world, these types of different cultural traditions and legal norms have inspired different levels of acceptance and comfort with abortion. The chart below outlines the differences between various religions’ position on abortion based on Pew’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study:48
MAJOR RELIGIOUS GROUPS’ POSITIONS ON ABORTION
Opposes abortion rights, with few or no exceptions Supports abortion rights, with some limits Supports abortion rights, with few or no limits No clear position
•African Methodist Episcopal Church
•Assemblies of God
•Roman Catholic Church
•Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints
•Hinduism
•Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod
•Southern Baptist Convention
•Episcopal Church
•Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
•United Methodist Church
•Conservative Judaism
•Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
•Reform Judaism
•Unitarian Universalist
•United Church of Christ
•Islam
•Buddhism
•National Baptist Convention
•Orthodox Judaism
Source: David Masci, “Where Major Religious Groups Stand on Abortion,” Pew Research Center, June 21, 2016, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/06/21/where-major-religious-groups-stand-on-abortion/.
These types of different communal views on abortion show up in public opinion polling from around the world. In 2017, for example, 58 percent of Americans polled believed abortion should be legal or mostly legal while 40 percent believed it should be illegal or mostly illegal. Not surprisingly, Jewish, Buddhist, and unaffiliated Americans supported abortion rights the most, while Catholics, Evangelicals, Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses opposed most strongly.49 A 2015 BuzzFeed poll of twenty-three countries found, not surprisingly, that liberal European countries were most permissive of abortions while more Christian and traditional Latin American, Asian, and African countries less so.50
These differences in belief show up in the wide range of laws regulating abortion in different jurisdictions around the world. According to Pew’s 2015 analysis of global abortion laws, 26 percent of the 196 countries surveyed allow abortions only to save the life of the mother, and an additional 42 percent place significant restrictions on abortion. Most of these restricting countries are ones where religious institutions play a leading role in society. All of the six countries banning abortion under any circumstances are countries where the church dominates.51 These different legal structures explain why women living in Louisiana, one of the U.S. states with the toughest restrictions on abortion,52 travel out of state when they need abortions or why women from Andorra, where abortions are banned, cross the border to France when seeking theirs.
The disparities between how different communities approach and regulate abortion is not just a precursor to the genetically modified humans debate but a central component of it. Because IVF and embryo selection, the gateway procedures for heritable human genetic engineering, nearly always entail the destruction or at least permanent freezing of unimplanted embryos, the politics of abortion is already morphing into the politics of assisted reproduction, embryo screening, and human gene editing. America’s Hyde Amendment is a perfect example of this. Inspired by the abortion debate, the amendment also created significant restrictions on human genetics research in the United States.53
If people have gone ballistic over the environmental, GMO, and abortion debates, if they have manned the barricades and destroyed research centers over genetically modified crops or attacked abortion clinics and murdered doctors, imagine what they might do when the same diversity of individual, cultural, societal, and governmental views inspires different national approaches to the emerging science of genetically modified people.
In 2016, a French activist group called Alliance VITA launched a campaign to “Stop GM Babies” with the petition below.54
PETITION
CRISPR-Cas9:
Yes to therapeutic progress, no to transgenic embryos!
Men deserve to be cared, and not genetically programmed.
For the past few months, the use of the CRISPR-Cas9 technology has been sharply increased: this technique allows to modify directly the DNA (genome) of any vegetable, animal, or human cell.
This technology, is promising to treating various genetic diseases in children and adults. But when applied to human embryos, it can produce from scratch, genetically modified humans: “GM babies.”
A worldwide ethical regulatory framework must be implemented.
GM babies? NO!
By signing this petition, I ask my country to urgently undertake and secure an international moratorium—meaning an immediate halt—on genetic modification of human embryos, in particular using the CRISPR-Cas9 technology.
Source: Alliance VITA, “Stop GM Babies: A National Campaign to Inform and Alert about CRISPR-Cas9 Technique,” May 24, 2016, https://www.alliancevita.org/en/2016/05/stop-gm-babies-a-national-campaign-to-inform-and-alert-about-crispr-cas9-technique/.
Signed by more than ten thousand people, this petition was not a wild success but was a harbinger of things to come. The future debate over genetically modified humans could be, at least in some ways, less contentious than t
he abortion struggle if the benefits of human genetic engineering can be widely experienced by the public more quickly than the fear-mongering can take hold. IVF is a good example of this.
In 1978 just after the birth of Louise Brown, 28 percent of Americans polled said IVF was morally wrong. Relatively quickly, however, people started to witness the benefits of IVF for helping women have babies. This evident success is why we are more likely to see pro-life campaigners picketing abortion clinics than fertility clinics, even if far more early-stage embryos are terminated in the latter. When asked in 2013, only 12 percent of Americans said IVF was morally wrong,55 far less than the 40 percent opposing abortion. On the other hand, public attitudes toward preimplantation genetic testing and genetically altering embryos have not yet normalized like they have for IVF.
Seventy-four percent of American surveyed in a 2002 Johns Hopkins University poll expressed support for using preimplantation embryo screening to avoid serious disease. But only 28 percent were comfortable using it to select the gender of a child, and 20 percent approved of using it to select for desirable non-disease-related traits like intelligence.56
Gene editing preimplanted embryos is, of course, a more significant intervention than selecting which embryo to implant in the mother. When asked by STAT and Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health in 2016 whether they thought gene editing should be used to improve the intelligence or physical characteristics on an unborn child, only 17 percent of Americans agreed.57 A Pew poll two years later similarly found that only 19 percent of Americans would be willing to change their baby’s genes to make the baby more intelligent.58 But when asked if they would be willing to gene edit their own future children to significantly reduce their baby’s risk of serious disease, nearly half of the Americans polled said yes in 2016, and that number increased to 72 percent in the 2018 poll.59
These polls not only show that Americans are more comfortable with interventions having a clear medical purpose than with everything else but also that parents will, conceptually at least, aggressively protect their future children from risk, including by altering their children’s genetics. The polls also indicate that popular American comfort levels with these types of interventions are growing. Like with the abortion polling, religious Americans are far more restrictive in their attitudes toward gene editing embryos than are the nonreligious.
The United Kingdom has seen perhaps the greatest shift toward increased acceptance of more aggressive genetic interventions. A third of Britons polled in 2001 felt that genetics research writ large was unethical, and tampering with nature.60 By 2017, however, 83 percent of UK residents surveyed by the Royal Society supported gene editing to cure serious disease when the genetic changes would not be passed to future generations. Seventy-six percent supported editing human genes to correct genetic disorders even when the genetic changes would be passed to future generations. An astounding 40 percent supported using genetic engineering to enhance human abilities like intelligence.61
The British population has experienced the highest level of public education on genetic technologies in the world, particularly in the context of the national conversation on mitochondrial transfer. This, plus the United Kingdom’s pro-science and open-minded national orientation, have translated into over three-quarters of the population supporting the genetic alteration of embryos in ways that would be passed to future generations forever, and nearly half the population expressing a willingness to genetically enhance their own future children.
Although China was far behind the West in assisted reproduction technologies only a decade ago, the country is showing the biggest global swing toward widespread acceptance of assisted reproduction. Living in a society where religious faith has been suppressed for decades, screening and aborting embryos is seen as less of a religious issue in China than in most other countries. The ancient Chinese concepts of taijiao, or fetal education, and yousheng, healthy birth, emphasize the importance of birthing optimally healthy babies.62 Along with the significant Chinese cultural stigma surrounding and lack of institutional support for people with disabilities, these concepts have paved the way for a greater societal acceptance of embryo screening in China than in most other countries.
In 2004, only four clinics in China had a license to perform PGT. By 2016, the number had risen to forty. Forty may not seem like a big number for a country as vast as China, but many of these clinics are now operating on a colossal scale far beyond clinics anywhere else. One single clinic in Changsha, a city near Beijing, reported 41,000 IVF procedures in 2016, a quarter of the total number carried out in the entire United States and more than in the entire United Kingdom that same year.
Across China, PGT is growing by an average of 60 to 70 percent annually. Costing a third of the U.S. price, the total number of these procedures in China is already greater than that in the United States and climbing.63 Chinese clinics are advertising their ability to use PGT to eliminate the risk of a growing number of genetic diseases. When asked in a 2017 online survey, the Chinese people surveyed on average “mildly agreed” they would be comfortable genetically altering their future children.64
These societal difference between the United States, the United Kingdom, and China may ultimately end up being less significant than the generational differences where younger people appear more comfortable with genetic engineering than their elders.65
As in the abortion context, religious differences are also already pushing communities in different directions on these issues. Most but not all religions accept that gene therapies can and even should be used to treat and cure diseases when genetic changes are not passed to future generations. But the holy water gets murkier from there.
The Catholic Church strongly opposes the use of PGT in conjunction with any type of embryo selection.66 In his 1995 Evangelum Vitae, Pope John Paul II wrote that prenatal diagnostic techniques incorporate a “eugenic intention” that “accepts selective abortion in order to prevent the birth of children affected by various types of anomalies.” This, he wrote, “is shameful and utterly reprehensible, since it presumes to measure the value of a human life only within the parameters of ‘normality’ and physical well-being, thus opening the way to legitimizing infanticide and euthanasia.”67 In 2013, the Catholic Church opposed the draft British law authorizing clinical trials of mitochondrial transfer, citing a 1987 Vatican instruction that “medical research must refrain from operations on live embryos, unless there is a moral certainty of not causing harm to the life or integrity of the unborn child.”68
The National Council of Churches of Christ, a more progressive protestant group, expressed in its 2016 report a greater appreciation for the role heritable genetic manipulation might play. “Effective germ line therapy could,” the report said, “offer tremendous potential for eliminating genetic disease, but it would raise difficult distinctions about ‘normal’ human conditions that could support discrimination against people with disabilities.”69
But that’s not as far as Christian liberalism extends. At a 2017 conference on the future of AI, I attended at Ditchley Manor in Oxfordshire, England, I met a fascinating Presbyterian minister, Christopher Benek, who describes himself as a “techno-theologian” and “Christian Transhumanist.” Humans are “co-creators with Christ,” he argued, and stewards of technologies like AI and gene editing that can be used to improve upon humanity. In his writing, he calls for an “ethical and helpful use of emerging technologies to enhance humans.”70
Chris’s views are certainly at the fringes of Christian theology, but they are probably a little closer to the center of gravity of Jewish thought. The traditional Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam, or repair the world, suggests that the world is broken, and it is the responsibility of each Jew, as god’s agent, to help fix it. “All that was created during the six days of creation,” the Torah says in Genesis 11:6, “requires improvement…the wheat needs to be ground, and even a person needs improvement.” Completing god’s creation, in this sense
, is seen not as critique of the divine but as embracing man’s divine purpose. Judaism doesn’t have the type of hierarchical command structure as Christianity, but even the more conservative Orthodox Jewish communities were, as the Tay-Sachs example shows, the earliest adopters of advanced genetic technologies.
In a 2015 article in a Jewish medical journal, Rabbi Moshe Tendler of Yeshiva University and bioethicist John Loike make the case for why Jewish law supports Jewish women participating in clinical trials of mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT), even though this treatment could ultimately result in the birth of genetically altered babies. Jewish law, they wrote, “permits women to engage in new biotechnologies such as MRT to have healthy offspring…[and] volunteering for such trials is not only a chesed [an act of loving-kindness] but engenders social responsibility so that Jews are contributing to the overall health of our society.”71
Being open to some genetic alterations does not mean, of course, that transhumanist Christianity, mainstream Judaism, progressive Buddhism, and other communities of faith are signing up for the slippery slope to unlimited transhumanism. But the diversity of beliefs on human genetic enhancement is already significant within and between religious and intellectual traditions and is more likely than not to grow as genetic technologies come of age. As this happens, science in general and transhumanist aspirations in particular will increasingly take on some of the trappings of a religion.72
Even in this human genetic revolution, these types of significant differences within and between individuals, communities, and governments about heritable genetic engineering are beginning to play out in a great diversity of national laws.
There is no U.S. federal legislation covering IVF in the United States, and America also has among the most accommodating regulatory structures for PGT. U.S. federal law bans funding for research in which embryos are destroyed, but the ways in which genetic screens are used during PGT is almost entirely left to the discretion of doctors themselves, guided by their medical professional organizations. As a result, an estimated 9 percent of all PGT carried out in the United States is for gender selection, which is illegal in countries like China, India, Canada, and the United Kingdom. A small number of U.S. clinics even allow prospective parents to affirmatively select embryos to ensure children will have genetic disorders like dwarfism or deafness, unthinkable in other parts of the world.73