Earlier this year in Gujarat, India, I came across a most unusual kind of outsourcing: womb rental.
Americans looking for a surrogate mother to bear a child can save a fortune and avoid regulations by paying an Indian woman $4,000 or $5,000 to carry their foetus. An embryo that has been created in vitro by the American parents is implanted in the Indian woman's uterus, and she goes through the pregnancy and delivers the baby -- and then hands it over to the Americans.
Ultimately, that kind of surrogacy could be mixed with genetic screening of embryos — to eliminate babies of the "wrong" gender or with the "wrong" characteristics— to save busy couples the bother of pregnancy or the nuisance of chance. Yes, all this scares me, too. So some of the most monumental decisions we will face in the coming years will involve where to set limits making some genetic tinkering legal and some illegal. One of the crucial evolving technologies is PGD, or preimplantation genetic diagnosis. This allows a couple to test embryos that have been created in vitro when they are three days old.
Michael Sandel, the Harvard philosopher, begins his new book on genetics, "The Case Against Perfection," with the story of a deaf couple who sought a child who would be deaf as well. "Is it wrong to make a child deaf by design?" he asks, then refining the question: "Is there still something wrong with parents picking and choosing the kind of child they will have?" Yes, there is.
Like Sandel, I worry that our scientific capabilities may surpass our wisdom. Look at the dog kingdom. All of today's dogs descended from wolves, and in less than 15,000 years we ended up with Chihuahuas and Great Danes. We may do the same to our own descendants. As Liza Mundy notes in her fascinating new book, "Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction is Changing Men, Women and the World," the main driving force in the new technologies is simply the profit motive. "What is at work in assisted reproduction," she writes, "is often not science but business."
New York Times
