THE TROUBLE-FRAUGHT QUEST FOR GENETIC PERFECTION

Chalk it up to sweeps week, but you still have to wonder about the convergence of a docudrama about Hitler with multi-segment features on Oprah, Today and a bunch of their competitors on sperm and egg donors and the recipients and their children.

The deeper bioethics of donor confidentiality, paternity, maternity, gamete possession in case of divorce and the disposal/protection of unused fertilized ova, make my head spin. So, too, the what-and-when to tell the child thereby conceived. (I heard one talking head assert that a toddler should be told, “Mommy and Daddy had a ‘helper’ to give birth to you.”) To the contrary, as a delighted father and grandfather by means of natural conception, I celebrate sperm and egg donation as a way of bringing the ultimate joy of birth and parenthood to an otherwise infertile couple.

But . . . should we not acknowledge at least an ounce of equivocation?

I guess that the ounce of equivocation dawned on me in a highly personal way: I would not be anyone’s candidate for sperm donation – overweight, diabetic, two coronary stents and a pacemaker, rotten ears and eyes, a predisposition to bipolarity, a witches’ brew of daily meds and certainly no Robert Redford. Not that I am a blithering moron, but still nobody’s candidate for sperm donation.

Then I saw those eager parents paging through glamour-shots of one Adonis or Rapunzel after another. This one is a PhD. That one is a ballerina. She is a little on the shy side. He has a great sense of humor. Twenty-twenty vision, uncorrected.
Naturally straight teeth. Cheerleader. Gymnast. Harvard grad. President of her class. I laughed and cried at the dilemma of the straight-from-the-bottle blond prospective mom, dithering about whether the donor should be naturally blond or a brunette. I recollected how friends and I used to joke about the cruel trick that nature would some day play on the hook-nosed daughters of mothers whose noses were cute-as-a-button through the gift of rhinoplasty.

Then, there is the matter of lineage. Does he come from a “good” family? What do we know about her ancestry? Any recessive ethnicity we ought to consider? Does his Anglo name belie a lineage that dates back to some unpronounceable Slavonic mishmash surname ending in “czyk”? (In case you were wondering, Wilson was Wiludzanski four generations ago.)

Hence, this is the ounce of equivocation: Do parents not have a right to stack the deck for having a beautiful, intelligent, articulate child by selecting sperm and eggs that are genetically superior? Yet, what defines superiority? Better yet, who defines superiority? Moreover, what and who define inferiority? And, in relegating all of this to genetics, are we not implicitly trivializing, even marginalizing, the heretofore passionate debate as to whether ones essential demeanor derives from nature or nurture?

My health is a mess, and much of it is primarily genetic, so God bless those parents who would not choose me. But, I am also a Jew, a full-blooded Pole, a child of immigrants, a relative of communists, an object of persecution, unwantedness and genocide. Would undesirability also be a function of my lineage? And, what of somebody of jumbled ethnicity? When does s/he become a “mongrel”? Or, what of someone whose face is not perfectly symmetrical? Or, somebody whose uncle is homosexual?

We are fools if we deem these concerns alarmist hyperbole. Oprah, Katie, et al, have yet to feature prospective parents who do not instantly gravitate to images of physical, emotional and intellectual perfection. No one yet has said, “I do not care what s/he looks like, because beauty and charm come from within, and they will primarily be a function of how we nurture our child.”

How much of all this is culturally encoded? We tisk-tisk the American pop culture’s preoccupation with ephemeral good looks, sexuality and booboisee (with credit to H.L. Mencken). Yet, we would still predictably choose the skanky voluptuousness of Britney over the intellect of Jean Kirkpatrick, the Golden Boy media-friendly visage of John Edwards over the crankiness of Bella Abzug. Joe Lieberman might make a terrific candidate, but can we imagine anyone choosing his genes over Leonardo DiCaprio’s? Do we want a kid who looks, or acts, like Mother Theresa?

So, again and again, let us deem a blessing the opportunity of an otherwise infertile couple to have the joy of parenthood through a surrogate’s eggs or sperm. But, let it also be a challenge to our ultimate values and to that which we ordain as a society’s concepts of superiority and inferiority. It is well to remember that Hitler’s definition of racial superiority did not take a nation by storm, but by slowly creeping into its roots. Yet, his machinations would have never prevailed if his followers had not already been predisposed toward creating a “perfect” race rather than valuing decency, wisdom and compassion as the highest qualities to which humanity can aspire.