Thread by me.
Mr. and Mrs. Jones want a baby. They visit a fertility clinic and announce: “We want a boy—blond hair and blue eyes, please. We want him to be at least six feet tall, good at sports and have great musical ability.”
“No sweat,” the doctor says. Nine months later, baby Logan is born.
But for Logan’s parents, things don’t work out quite the way they expected. Despite his outstanding physique, Logan has no interest in sports. He likes to write poetry instead. As for music—yes, he’s good at it, his genes have seen to that—but he’d much rather spend his time designing model airplanes.
Logan’s parents are furious. They paid good money for a son who would make them proud on the athletic field and in the concert hall! Plus—the final insult—Logan dyed his blonde hair purple.
While this is not a true story, of course—but it could be soon enough. A Los Angeles fertility clinic now offers testing for “cosmetic selection.” The procedure is known as pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. It involves removing a cell from an embryo and testing it for desired physical traits.
According to Dr. Jeff Steinberg, who runs the clinic, parents can choose the sex of their baby, and also pick out junior’s hair and eye color. The babies will, of course, be free of inherited diseases. Dr. Frankenstein—I mean, Dr. Steinberg—checks for those, as well.
Dr. Gillian Lockwood, a British fertility expert, has a question for Steinberg. “What,” she wants to know, “are you going to do with all those other embryos that turn out like me to be ginger [haired] with green eyes?”
The answer is that embryos who don’t make the grade are destroyed—or sold to medical researchers. . .
Thread by springtime4hillary.
Particularly at the later stages of pregnancy, the right to abortion does not protect an interest in killing a fetus as such. What it protects instead is the woman's interest in not being physically, internally occupied by another creature against her will, the same interest that explains the right to use deadly force, if necessary, to stop a rapist. Though the fetus is innocent of any intentional wrongdoing and the rapist is not, the woman's interest in repelling an unwanted physical intrusion is quite similar. . .