Parenting Genetically Engineered Children

Biotechnology is allowing us to control our parenting experience in ways that have never been available before the discovery of DNA. Parents can already choose the sex of their children and screen for genetic diseases both pre-implantation and in utero. (See Embryonic Screening for Breast Cancer Genes.) In the future, they may even be able to custom design traits such as stronger muscles for athletic kids, faster metabolism and height for supermodel kids, or melodic vocal chords for pop star kids.

In The Case Against Perfection (The Atlantic, April 2004, subscription only), Michael J. Sandel lays out what’s wrong with this scenario:

Bioengineering gives us reason to question the low-tech, high-pressure child-rearing practices we commonly accept. The hyperparenting familiar in our time represents an anxious excess of mastery and dominion that misses the sense of life as a gift. This draws it disturbingly close to eugenics.
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Parents become responsible for choosing, or failing to choose, the right traits for their children.
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In a social world that prizes mastery and control, parenthood is a school for humility. That we care deeply about our children and yet cannot choose the kind we want teaches parents to be open to the unbidden. Such openness is a disposition worth affirming, not only within families but in the wider world as well. It invites us to abide the unexpected, to live with dissonance, to rein in the impulse to control. A Gattaca-like world in which parents became accustomed to specifying the sex and genetic traits of their children would be a world inhospitable to the unbidden, a gated community writ large. The awareness that our talents and abilities are not wholly our own doing restrains our tendency toward hubris.

As for our family, we are making the following pledge to our son:

~We are your parents. We gave you life but we are not your life.

~You are our son. You expand our world but you are not our world.

~We accept you without indulging or neglecting you.

~We cultivate you without badgering or rejecting you.

~We are open to the unbidden.