The problem of genetic engineering and eugenics becomes a topical question for modern science and medicine. The article “Supersize Your Child” vividly portrays the beginnings of the scientific research and moral and ethical dilemma faced by modern scientists. The author states that unnatural selection will deepen species inequality and as such demand’s protection and legislation. What science may achieve soon, though, is increasing the odds of a boy or a girl being born; this could be done through screening techniques. Recent research has, in fact, brought us a step closer to the day when a couple might be able to pick the sex of their child before it is conceived. Thesis Eugenics and genetic engineering proposes opportunities for parents to construct their child before birth but leads to unpredicted and uncontrolled consequences for the whole of mankind.
Most scientists have welcomed the new eugenics guidelines as necessary to control the revolutionary research work in genetics and cut the chances of unleashing something terrible on the public. Some feel they are not strong enough, that the precautions are not foolproof. There is fear that while some scientists will now think twice before recombining DNA, others may not. Human nature and scientific curiosity are powerful influences in a laboratory, as is the competition to be first with a new research result. Furthermore, since the guidelines are not laws, there is nothing to prevent biochemists from carrying on recombinant DNA experiments in small laboratories without government funding, or without anyone knowing what they are up to. The research is also done in other countries, all of which have scientists as skilled as our own. Although several nations are trying to regulate such research, there is thus far nothing to compel them to. With so many laboratories working in genetics, it is almost impossible to control and contain all of the organisms involved. What is clear is that biology or chemistry, as interpreted and applied by imaginative and skilled scientists, has already shaped our lives in ways that our ancestors could hardly have imagined. Hayes is right stating that “we need to distinguish benign applications of these technologies from pernicious ones” (Hayes 188). Whether the good has outweighed the bad in what science has done is still open to discussion. It is also clear that we are now part of another biological and chemical age, a revolution that sooner or later is bound to affect us all as directly as it now affects the seemingly insignificant viruses and bacteria and their tiny specks of DNA. The risks for humanity in what scientists are now able to do are unquestionably greater than they were a century ago.
Scientists have already done genetic engineering in animals. Nevertheless, a number of interesting developments that stop just short of the birth of a test-tube baby have been recorded, developments that make it virtually certain that soon in vitro fertilization will produce a full-grown baby, perhaps even as you read this. Up to this point, we have used the term “engineering” to refer to the manipulation or management of cellular and brain “machinery.” It is called biomedical engineering, and it is truly an alliance between biologists, physicians, and engineers — the latter group including electrical, chemical, and mechanical engineers. Hayes is right that biomedical engineering’s goal is to solve medical problems and to improve bodily function and mobility through the development of devices called prostheses. Biomedical engineering has much progressed since the days of the seafarers’ peg legs and hooked hands. While we have not quite reached that technological level, the implantation of artificial devices in human beings, and the linking of patients to external devices like the artificial-kidney and heart-lung machines, has become a rather routine part of modern medical practice.
The advantages of eugenics are that it allows copying the identity of a mother and father. Female reproductive capacities have been used as a good reason for a number of social divisions between men and women. In addition, class and gender differences have also been a part of these reasons. The assertion by a mother that ‘her body is her own is a refusal to become an object; it is a claim to be taken seriously as a subject. Women assert that a mother possesses her body they are making a number of overlapping arguments including, firstly, that each mother, and no one else, should have the final say over her body. The individual then acquires rights to other forms of reproduction by means of mixing the ‘labor of his body’ with the common resources provided in nature. The strong disagreement against reproduction comes from a notion of self-ownership: once all people are recognized equally persons regardless of color or ethnic origin, they could not be bought and so like as chattels. Yet within traditional reproduction theory, there is a reluctance to recognize self-ownership by mothers. One of the ways that mothers support authority over their bodies is by appealing to an analogy with the possession of the property. The analogy of bodies with possessions has a long history in liberal democratic thought, beginning with John Locke in the seventeenth century asserting that a person’s property rights over things develop from a pre-existing right to the possessions of his own person’.
Eugenics is a process that seems to transfer the ownership of women from their fathers to their husbands. This ownership extended from control over the woman’s sexual expression to possession of any children she might bear. It is no surprise that nineteenth-century feminists campaigned for changes to laws of marriage and divorce including custody of children, and for the recognition of a woman’s right to set conditions on her sexual experience within marriage. Reproduction is not theft because it is a natural biological process that helps mankind to prolong life on the Earth. Genetic engineering is natural for every man and woman as it allows them to become a mother and father taking care of their child. The underdeveloped relations have led to the penury of the debate by tending to change multifaceted arguments into one symbolic one. This has contributed to contradictory mobilizations of the notion of a reproduction position in the public debate. Attacks on abortion politics continue to arouse social action but developments in assisted reproduction are greeted with puzzlement; it is hard to work out which issues to ask, much less useful answers to those issues and problems.
In sum, the “Supersize Your Child” idea is possible but it hides many threats and dangers for mankind. Eugenics threats throw a barrier across the path of researchers who must fulfill science’s other great commitment — the betterment of humankind through eradication of disease and by giving all of us a better world in which to live. But the guidelines must not be so restrictive as to stand in the way of what science is a never-ending quest. The idea that reproduction is, in fact, controllable rather than controllable in the abstract, has had mixed outcomes for both politics and the lives of women. The idea of eugenics control has abstracted the physiological issues of reproduction from the wider social issues of sexual relationships, kinship, understandings of the social meanings of masculinity and femininity, and the power relations implicit in a technologically advanced culture.
Works Cited
Hayes, H. “Supersize Your Child” in The Structure of Argument by Annette T. Rottenberg and Donna Haisty Winchell, pp. 185-189.