Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World should be required reading for anyone interested in social policy questions. In Huxley’s “happy dystopia”, the ties of flesh and blood have absolutely no importance. All children are conceived in test-tubes, and veryone is selected and conditioned as embroyos to fulfill a particular societal function, with those that don’t measure up being discarded. People have become alienated from their own humanity.
When I read stories like the following one about the fertility industry in Hollywood [1], I often think that society needs a Brave New World (BNW) Index to sit alongside GDP and other measures of economic and social wellbeing.
Here’s a passage:
When Sarah Fain, a TV writer-producer for The Shield and The Vampire Diaries, decided at 37 to be a single mom, she started online sperm-donor browsing. “It’s like online dating, only you don’t have to have a relationship with the person,” she says. “It’s not: ‘What if this is the love of my life?’ It’s: ‘This person doesn’t have Alzheimer’s in their genetic history.’ ” Fain lined up a fertility entourage that included a therapist, acupuncturist, nutritionist and private chef for when she was too busy developing shows for Warner Bros. to cook. “I did acupuncture, herbs, teas; I juiced wheatgrass daily for months because my reproductive endocrinologist [RE] said anecdotally people who did got pregnant,” she says. Despite her efforts, Fain required two years and nine rounds of intrauterine insemination. At age 40, Fain had a girl named Violet.
When Violet was a toddler, Fain took her to a music class, where “two women walked in with two boys about Violet’s age,” she says. One of the boys looked familiar. Fain went home and checked her Facebook group comprising 15 families who had conceived with her same open donor. (Open donation, in which the donor’s info can be released on the child’s 18th birthday, is a growing trend.) She recalls: “There they were,” just a mile and a half away.
Now they all have dinner every Sunday. “They’re my family,” says Fain. In September, the Facebook group rented a vacation house. “Talk about crazy — there were 12 2-year-olds,” says Fain, who adds: “It’s one of those things that feels incredibly bizarre for half an hour. Then it feels totally normal.”
I mean, you either see what’s wrong with this or you don’t. I always say “read the whole thing [1]” but the Hollywood Reporter piece is essential reading, if you can stomach it. This is the thick end of the wedge: what happens when you get rich people with a lot of money who are determined to have what they want, and damn the consequences – and a fertility industry that’s happy to oblige.
Haven’t met someone to have children with? Maybe I’ll just decide to become a single mother, and in the process deprive my children of a relationship with their genetic father. If one man fathered children with 15 different women by conventional means, we’d have an idea what to call him. But nope, this is only bizarre for half an hour.
There’s much worse. Jeffrey Steinbeg was part of the team that produced the first “test-tube baby” in 1978, and now heads the Fertility Institute, which has clinics in L.A and New York and “speicalises in cutting-edge genetic procedures.” Like these ones:
Genetically testing the embryos, known as preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD, is one way to stack the odds in favor of a pregnancy. Nearly every embryo that Steinberg transfers has been tested to confirm that it has the correct number of chromosomes; other tests confirm the lack of certain inheritable-disease genes such as BRCA, the breast cancer gene that Angelina Jolie carries. Steinberg says PGD reduces miscarriages: “What that’s done is eliminate Down syndrome. We can’t guarantee a perfect baby, but we can guarantee that anything you’re concerned about isn’t there.” (Including the wrong eye color: In 2009, after admonishment from the Vatican and the medical community, Steinberg stopped allowing parents to choose their babies’ blues — the most popular color — but quietly started up again with 15 infants last year: “There’s a huge interest. Even when we retracted, the emails just kept coming in.”)
Words fail. No, they really do. It’s Orwell’s 1984 that comes to mind here. War is peace. Ignorance is strength. Reduce miscarriages by discarding any children with Down Syndrome – or ones with the wrong eye colour.
Eugenics was wrong in the 1930s, and it’s still wrong now.
There’s more in the piece about egg donation and surrogacy too:
Several Westside fertility doctors say that about half their patients plan to keep their offspring’s origins under wraps; Steinberg estimates 70 percent of his patients do. The PR firm CEO is one of them: “I carried them. My blood ran through them,” she says. “I don’t want them to think they’re not mine.”
…
Once a healthy child is born, parents are faced with what to do with unused embryo “siblings,” which cost hundreds of dollars annually to keep in deep freeze. Increasingly, people are allowing excess embryos to be “adopted” (it is considered unethical for embryos to be bought or sold). Those embryo adoptions often are anonymous, creating full biological siblings who may never know of one another’s existence.
This is the logical consequence of accepting that people have a right to a child by any means necessary. Infertility is a huge burden and a tragic loss. But these solutions are far, far worse. They are, in fact, dystopian.