Geez, the end of human dignity sure snuck up on us.
This week saw Ron Harris, a fashion photographer, throw a new twist into internet shopping clubs. He is offering the ovarian eggs of models to the highest bidder. Yes, at $150,000 an egg, you too can have a model baby.
We stress to the smart consumer: hold off buying any sort of offspring until actual DNA replication is perfected, otherwise you might be left with a disappointing lack of quality. The eye or hair color may be one or two shades off. How could you ever love a child who was created with such shoddy workmanship. The new world way of making babies may be a lot like Consumers Distributing. Do you remember them?
You can say that will never happen, but really isn’t that the same thing we’ve said about every step it took us to achieve this point?
We all recoil in horror when we hear of mixing genes to create to perfect baby (I think blue eyes, Honey). But a weird feeling comes over us when we try to stamp out Cystic Fibrosis and other genetically inherited disease. Please for a moment think about where all of this could be going. Heterosexual children anyone?
While this is almost universally dismissed as stupid and wrong, every time you hear about this sort of wheeling and dealing with human life, it desensitizes you to the next episode. Does anyone wonder what happened to Dolly?
Well, she is rapidly dying of old age at the age of three, but still science is creating a sheep which can grow spider silk instead of wool. Creepy.
We’ve gone from a society which had real concerns about cloning to a society that feels blase about paying upwards of $100,000 (us) for a chance at a baby which may or may not be more beautiful than yourself. This isn’t some John Lennon songsheet, this is the building blocks of human beings.
What in the world does it say about the self esteem of the woman who will carry it to term? What does it say about the "father" of said child? And what about the child, who grows up knowing its mom didn’t think she was beautiful enough to use her own ovum. What a completely negative environment for a child to live in. We’ve heard of the selfish gene, but this does not compute. This is the stupid gene.
Generalizations aside, how far have we come that we do not recognize the absurdity in this? This goes well beyond what should seem reasonable for intelligent adults.
This isn’t life as we know it. This is Blade Runner material.