“Germline engineering would fundamentally and negatively change the relationship between parent and child.”
short, it threatens to make parental love and acceptance contingent on the full expression of purchased genes. While the threat that germline engineering poses to the family stands as reason enough to condemn it, the societal risks it poses are even greater. For one, our troubling history with eugenic policies suggests that it is not improbable that germline enhancements could become statesponsored. Surely we need only consult our history books filled with anti-miscegenation statutes, racially-based immigration restrictions, and compulsory sterilization laws aimed at the “unfit” and “feebleminded” to expose germline engineering for what it really is – the latest and greatest platform for eugenics. Not according to Caplan, however. He argues that germline enhancements would only occur at the urging of two parents who want to give their future child the best possible start to life. The idea that the U.S. government would force its particular vision of perfection on prospective parents, he writes, “flies in the face of a number of facts about the pursuit of perfection in other areas of health care.”25 For example, Caplan notes that despite the presence of cosmetic surgeons in the U.S., no slope has “developed in American society to the effect that those with big noses or poor posture must visit a specialist and have these traits altered.”26 He wrongly assumes, however, that society places equal value on all human characteristics. True, the state has little conceivable interest in regulating innocuous traits like nose size and posture, but it surely
has a far greater interest in controlling such characteristics as IQ, physical stamina, and mathematical ability. In their book From Chance to Choice, Buchanan and others speak to this point: There is reason to worry that [genetic] interventions undertaken by or at the initiative and urging of the state would be more likely to be motivated by a societal, not an individual, perspective about what kind of children it would be best for the society to have…. It is not plausible to rule out completely enhancements for the benefit of society, as opposed to the subject of the enhancement.27 After all, what does American history show if not that the U.S., in the company of other Western countries, might be receptive to population eugenic goals again in the future? Certainly it does not follow – and history tells us that it has not followed – that a government unconcerned with standards of physical appearance must also be unconcerned with standards of intelligence or social acceptability. Even if the state never coerces parents to genetically enhance their children, however, parents will still likely face significant social pressures to conform to this standard. Once some parents begin genetically enhancing their children, others will feel obligated to give their children an equal footing with their engineered peers. This process, McKibben predicts, will only gain pace once it has started; it will set off 59