Just as it is wrong to dehumanize, objectify, and disparage the lives of ill and disabled people, so too should we worry about transforming unborn human life into a malleable resource to be exploited for the benefit of the already born in cellular procedures such as cloning, stem cell extraction, and genetic manipulation. Why is this important? Perhaps Dr. Leon R. Kass puts it best in an essay entitled “The Wisdom of Repugnance." Kass writes that the stakes at risk in these Brave New World issues are very high: "We are faced with having to decide nothing less than whether human procreation is going to remain human." (Leon R. Kass, 1998).
One need only harken back to the writings of bioethics patriarch Joseph Fletcher to understand the basis of Kass's alarm. To Fletcher, nothing in the natural way of life was sacrosanct. Indeed, even basic biology did not prevent his advocating the most unnatural biological manipulation.
Joseph Fletcher is not alone among modern bioethics writers in embracing a new eugenics. Philip Kitcher's book The Lives to Come: The Genetic Revolution and Human Possibilities further illustrates the point. Kitcher foresees "laissez-faire eugenics" in which people will create their own versions of optimal human life—a prospect that Kitcher assures readers will work out just fine because there would also be universally shared respect for difference. Yet paradoxically, Kitcher admits that individual choices are not made in a social vacuum. If infanticide ever becomes respectable, Fletcher's and Peter Singer's dreams of "post-birth abortions" might also become commonplace, as indeed they already are in the Netherlands. (Joseph Fletcher, 1979).
In addition to infants predisposed to health problems or disabilities, genetically "undesirable" babies might also never see the light of day in the world...............
