WSJ: Designing Children

[question everything]

The Wall Street Journal

Designing Children

By NANCY DEWOLF SMITH
May 12, 2006; Page W3

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"Frozen Angels" (PBS Tuesday, 10-11:30 p.m., but check local listings) is set in Los Angeles. Not surprisingly, the city of beautiful, enhanced bodies is also the destination of choice for people who want designer babies. Part of the program is focused on the services available right now, in clinics and other agencies where customers can choose sperm or eggs based on the donor's appearance -- down to the shape of their mouth -- IQ, and aptitude for sports, music or whatever other attributes they yearn for in a child. Among the surprises: Many of the customers are from overseas -- so-called "reproductive tourists." Increasingly, they are flocking to the U.S. as their own countries tighten rules about or even outlaw practices that involve surrogacy and egg selection -- for instance, to weed out female embryos and implant only male ones. Those who don't travel to the U.S. can order sperm on the Internet and -- we are even more startled to hear repeatedly -- there is a huge demand for white genes, preferably with specific characteristics. Bill Handel who runs the Center for Surrogate Parenting, says that when it comes to choosing egg donors, everyone wants "a blond, blue-eyed shiksa goddess of love." The more portable sperm, meanwhile, has become an "American trade product...a new imperialism" one observer laments here.

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When the film's principal characters aren't on screen, "Frozen Angels" takes us through a night-time city of winking headlights and fleeting glimpses of anonymous street life. In true noir style, it leaves us feeling detached and uneasy. Because the program is not just about the technology of today, but the brave new world of tomorrow. In that coming world, we are told, the routine of the "mastubatorium" will give way to labs where technicians engineer new lives with artificial chromosomes or by injecting and removing genes to produce made-to-order children. Who cares if it goes wrong sometimes, like the "Doogie Howser" mice (named after the teenage-prodigy doctor on TV) that were engineered to be super smart, then turned out to have an abnormally high susceptibility to pain? "We're not at risk as individuals" one new-frontier advocate explains. Each person will be able to decide if they want to experiment or not. Unless, of course, some biologists are correct, and eventually, genetically modified people will find that they can't breed with "natural" ones and the human race essentially divides into two different species.

Ah, well, all that is in the future, like global warming. The Showtime film "little man" is set firmly in the present and it raises questions that are inescapable right now. The little man of the title is Nicholas, born 100 days prematurely and weighing less than a pound -- to a surrogate mother with a host of previously undisclosed health problems. The prospective parents, the life partners Nicole Conn and Gwen Baba, already had a healthy little girl who was the product of their eggs and a sperm donor. So when prenatal tests revealed that baby-to-be Nicholas, who was not genetically related to his parents, was abnormally small, they were unprepared for the decisions and consequences that would follow. The doctors and Gwen believed that abortion was the best course and argued passionately for it. But Nicole said "no." She had already bonded with the unborn child, she explains here, and was determined to fight for his life. And fight she did... When he finally came home, his care was no easier or less complicated. He needed oxygen through his nose, a feeding tube in his stomach, and many emergency hospitalizations. He was severely myopic, and required hearing aids.

Familiar family life, and the couple's relationship as they knew it, was gone. As medical bills reached $2.4 million, they thanked God for insurance and the extra coverage that the state of California gives to families with severely premature infants. But eventually, even Nicole, the only one who didn't feel that bringing Nicholas into the world was a mistake, began to question her decision. By then, if not sooner, many viewers will have wondered about all that, too. Only there is Nicholas, alive if not entirely well. When they put tiny eyeglasses on him for the first time, the expression on his face -- as he finally sees the faces of his mothers and all the contours and colors of the room around him -- is unmistakable. It's pure joy.

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