Are we prepared for genetic testing that will not only determine a baby's sex, eye, and hair color, but (soon) whether your baby is gay, smart, Republican, or, perhaps, an excellent parallel parker? Mark Morford, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, says we should prepare ourselves for the inevitability, and instead of being shocked and outraged, we need to get over ourselves. Morford writes:
...we kid ourselves into thinking
that we don't want it this way, that we want nothing to do with natural
selection, with "playing God," when in fact we've already proven a
million times over that we want to control and customize every aspect
of our lives, from our pets to our plants to our foodstuffs to the
color of your iPod...Put another way: We think it's perfectly
acceptable, say, to spend ten grand at a clinic to have three dozen
frozen test-tube embryos forcibly implanted in the womb all in the
hopes that the strongest will survive—but the notion of choosing the
gender and hair color of your kid is radically off limits? Please.
Call it shadenfreude, but Morford is looking forward to the "delightful mess" that will occur when genetics will force people to face their feelings about, for example, having a possibly gay child. Within the next decade, he says, we will be forced to confront every prejudice, law, injustice, and liberal bias due to advances in genetics. How will we conduct ourselves? Morford can't wait to find out.
