William Saletan, the guy who thinks progressives lost the war over abortion through their own elitist stupidity, now warns that
we're sliding inexorably towards eugenics. The reason? British medical ethicists have begun broadening the criteria for selection when testing pre-implantation IVF embryos to see if they have genetic diseases. At first, they only considered genes that were 90% likely to cause severe genetic diseases as grounds for not implanting an embryo, but now they're down to 80%, and they're talking about some genes that only have a 30-60% chance of predicting disease. And Saletan worries "there's no sign of a foothold ahead that will brake our slide":
How low can we go? According to an internal HFEA briefing paper, "there are likely to be susceptibility genes identified that increase the chance of developing a condition by a very small amount (e.g. 1 or 2%)." The paper says such low-probability genes should be distinguished from high-probability genes, but it offers no logical place to draw a line. A bioethicist and an IVF expert quoted in the HFEA's report argue that if a disease is bad enough, embryos should be discardable for genes with even minimal probabilities of causing that disease.
Here's an idea. How about 5%? That's the universally accepted red line for determining statistical significance. It happens to be a completely arbitrary figure. But for whatever reason, nobody ever seems to suggest we move it any higher or lower. Because it's a very good number. It's small enough that the likelihood that correlations are accidental is pretty remote, but big enough that it doesn't set the experimental bar impossibly high. And everybody knows we need some number which everyone can agree on. In this case, we need a number that's big enough that it doesn't just seem like arbitrary noise, but small enough that you don't end up with too many parents cursing the system for giving them a child with a hole in his heart. Somewhere in the range of 5% to 10% seems about right.
Now, was that so hard? The thing I can't stand about these "slippery-slope" arguments is that they presume that humans lack both any kind of common sense, and any capacity for social deliberation and action. And what is the horrific prospect we're discussing here? A world where people who use IVF are less likely to have genetic diseases than they are now. Eeeeevil!!!...
Certainly, there are some powerful arguments against too much interference in one's kids' genetic makeup. Perhaps the strongest arguments have to do with class differences -- what happens when the rich get perfect genes, and the poor are stuck on Darwin's treadmill? But of course the British, who are pioneering in this field, have come up with a solution to that problem. It's called free universal health care.