EDITORIAL – Skim or whole? Boy or girl? Brits can pick

As citizens in a free society, we have the right to choose many things — political parties,… As citizens in a free society, we have the right to choose many things — political parties, love interests, hair-care products. But should we have the right to choose our children’s gender?

Across the Atlantic, the U.K. Parliament’s Science and Technology committee recommended loosening laws that would allow women getting in vitro fertilization to choose the gender of their children. Of course, this has raised the image of “futuristic designer children” — that, given this privilege, parents will start manufacturing the perfect, blond-and-blue babies of their dreams. Which, in addition to being alarmist, is kind of ridiculous.

Choosing a child’s gender — a one-or-the-other choice — is hardly playing God. Instead, it’s expressing a simple preference. If parents are going to the effort of getting in vitro fertilization, a lengthy and expensive process, then, in the rare instance that they actually have a preference other than “healthy child,” why shouldn’t they be allowed to pick it?

Some on the committee called this recommendation a license to make children “consumer items.” Well, if parents are paying doctors and fertility clinics to implant embryos, those children already are “consumer items,” bought and paid for, and brought into the world by people who genuinely want them.

The “Brave New World”-style baby manufacturing that many people fear may come about is absurd. While the slippery-slope argument may work for things like democratization or swearing on TV, it doesn’t work in this instance. Scientific, not just social, boundaries govern exactly how far we can go. Fantastical as some innovations may be, life doesn’t always imitate art, and science doesn’t always imitate science fiction.

If this recommendation is enacted as law, the United Kingdom will be a testing ground for this sort of screening, a form of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis — testing an embryo’s genetic composition before it’s put in the womb.

But there’s a difference between seeing if the embryo will be male or female and seeing if it will have a super-genius IQ or be great at the accordion. Determining gender requires a fairly simple test. Determining those other traits would require much more advanced tests — if any for the “accordion gene” could even be made — and would have to take nurture, as well as nature, into account.

Bioethics is one of those lofty topics with very real consequences. As the stem cell and cloning controversies show, it’s not just talking heads, politicians and experts who are affected by these — it’s people with heretofore-incurable diseases, who are making life-and-death decisions.

Most of our baby-making days are a long way off, but so are most of the scientific advances that will affect our future progeny. What’s happening across the pond now foreshadows the environment in which some of us will be having kids.

As the average age of first childbearing rises in the United States and most postindustrial countries, more people will probably be turning to scientific methods for conception, meaning more people will be making these choices. Picking a boy or girl doesn’t make people gods or monsters — it just makes them humans with human preferences.