abies are the new hot thing. From creepy fake newborns retailing for close to $1,000 to the uproar surrounding “Octomom” Nadya Suleman, the public’s fascination with infants seems to have escalated over the last few months. Another addition to the “bizarre things having to do with babies” list is the recent news that two clinics in Los Angeles and New York, both owned by Dr. Jeff Steinberg, will happily offer to customize your baby. Physical traits like eye and hair color can be altered at will, among other characteristics—without pause to consider the absurdity of it all.
As a Los Angeles native, I have witnessed many of the cosmetic “treatments” some parents inflict on their young children. By sixth grade, I hardly batted an eye at the fact that my classmates were getting blond highlights in their hair every month. Even earlier, in fifth grade, I vividly remember three or four of my friends’ incredulity at the fact that I had never gotten a facial in my eleven years on the planet. And being an adolescent in Los Angeles is even more ridiculous. The emphasis on appearance in the city has been frequently commented upon and its status as the “capital of entertainment” has been rather burdensome. We are too often inundated with fake breasts, bleached hair, and near-skeletal failed actresses and models that so deftly dominate the landscape.
However, in the eighteen years I have lived in Los Angeles, I can’t recall having observed anything close to what Dr. Jeff Steinberg claims he can offer: the ability to create a chosen amalgamation of features, and to craft a couple’s vision of the perfect child. Such a possibility cuts deeper than any spa treatment performed on a twelve-year-old—it provides a path for us to outwit Mother Nature.
Steinberg has already offered his patients the ability to choose their future child’s gender through a process called Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD). Using the same method, he claims that he is able to examine the genetic traits of embryos and implant those carrying the traits that the parents desire. Traditionally PGD has been used to screen for diseases such as cystic fibrosis, sickle cell disease, and Huntington’s disease and involves performing a biopsy on embryos before they are implanted into a woman’s uterus. Of course, in doing so, one can determine the gender of the fetus the embryo will eventually develop into, a benefit that Steinberg and other likeminded doctors have furiously capitalized on.
The idea that future parents can systematically select their child’s gender has been enough to inspire significant outrage. According to an article published by the New York Daily News, the majority of New York parents polled were sickened by the idea. However, some were sympathetic to it, noting that the ability to choose the gender of one’s children is not altogether a bad thing.
As shocking as Steinberg’s initial claim is, his ability to customize other traits comes as an additional bombshell. In the wake of repeated criticism, Steinberg has responded, “genetic health is the wave of the future. It’s already happening and it’s not going to go away. It’s going to expand. So if [critics have] major problems with it, they need to sit down and really examine their own consciences because there’s nothing that’s going to stop it.”
However, people do seem all too eager to examine their consciences, and many have rejected the notion that picking and choosing comparatively trivial physical features is okay.
Indeed, Steinberg has yet to quell the anxiety felt by many who recoil at the “mad scientist” aspects of his procedure; criticism has been leveled at PGD from a wide spectrum of people and interests. Interestingly, this seems to be one issue on which both pro-choice and pro-life forces can agree. On one end of the spectrum, the Pope has spoken out, arguing that in“the obsessive search for the perfect child…a new mentality is creeping in that tends to justify a different consideration of life and personal dignity.” The Catholic Church has a pretty fixed track record on reproductive rights, so it is not surprising that the Pope would object to science interfering with the “natural” conception of a child. However, secularists have also leveled attacks at the procedure. For some, PGD’s customized children come uncomfortably close to the idea of a “master race.” Even Dr. Steinberg concedes that the procedure’s best results have been among couples of Scandinavian descent whose genes are “undiluted.”
Considering the ramifications of this procedure, it’s obvious the traits most desired by parents are recessive: blue/green eyes and blond hair. If a couple wanted to have a child with dark hair and dark eyes, chances are they would do it the old fashioned way. Given the fact that there are fewer people with light features world-wide, the chances that most couples will naturally conceive a dark-haired and dark-eyed child are generally pretty good.
Really, this whole business conjures up images of the Hitler Youth—a breed of children carefully selected based on their possession of a “desirable” set of physical features. The historical connection is thinly veiled, made all the more chilling by the fact that a belief in eugenics and selective sterilization existed not too long ago in America. It’s therefore appropriate that, in part due to shame surrounding its history, Germany has enacted an embryo protection law prohibiting PGD. Engineering a child to look a certain way is unnatural not only for obvious reasons, but also touches on a historical blight that few wish to relive.
Even so, the question of “naturalness” is not what so many people on so many ideological levels object to. Rather, the implication that parents are now able to invest themselves in what their children will look like challenges traditional parental behaviors, like nurturing and acceptance. According to a professor at USC, this customization undermines “the notion of unconditional love and support—which is assumed to be what parents owe their children.”
For a generation of upper-middle class kids and young adults raised on the idea that effort and self-esteem are of the utmost importance, Steinberg’s procedure may come as a great blow. The idea that our parents could change something about us, something they deem undesirable and thus worthy of correction is particularly unsettling, considering such unwanted features would not be behavioral or emotional but instead pureply physical—and accordingly superficial. For all of the historical and ideological conflicts Dr. Steinberg’s claims broach, perhaps the most disturbing thing about them is the challenge they pose to our sense of self-worth.
