I once saw a woman wearing a T-shirt that read "I may be fat but you're ugly and I can diet." I smiled and then forgot about it until something I read retrieved it from the attic of my memory: In May, the British Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HEFA) gave a London fertility clinic permission to genetically screen for what many specialists regard as a cosmetic defect.

The condition is what is known as squint, also known as strabismus. As the name suggest, it involves the eyes: The affected eye, instead of looking ahead, will look inwards (convergent squint) or outwards toward the corner of the eyes (divergent squint). Squint's effects on vision can range from the mild (blurred vision in the affected eye) to severe (amblyopia, a.k.a., "lazy eye"). There are a range of treatment options: eyeglasses, temporary patches, eye drops and, in the most severe cases, surgery.

The clinic whose application was approved will employ pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) in which embryos are created using in-vitro fertilization (IVF). A cell is then removed from the embryo and tested for the presence of genes linked to certain conditions, in this case squint. Only those embryos free of the gene are re-implanted in the womb. Those with the gene are destroyed.

Until recently, the use of PGD had been limited to searching for the genes linked to "life-shortening conditions such as cystic fibrosis and fatal blood disorders." Then, in what shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has followed this and other biotech issues, the use of PGD began to expand: Recently, "doctors have also recently started screening for adult diseases such as some forms of cancer and early-onset Alzheimer's."

The ruling in question was at the behest of a businessman with squint and his wife who, as the Times of London put it, "want to ensure they do not have a severely cross-eyed child."

While it's easy to empathize (which isn't the same as agreeing) with a parent who doesn't want his child to endure what he has, there's more at stake here than the happiness of one family.

As David King, who heads the public interest watchdog group Human Genetics Alert, told the U.K. Telegraph, "philosophers love to deride the idea of a slippery slope, but here it is in practice. We moved from preventing children who will die young to those who might become ill in middle age. We now discard those who will live as long as the rest of us but are cosmetically imperfect."

Someone who agrees with King is Gedis Grudzinskas, the director of the Bridge Centre Family Clinic, which will perform the procedure that prompted the story. Grudzinskas predicts that, as a result of this ruling, "we will increasingly see the use of embryo screening for severe cosmetic conditions."

By "severe cosmetic conditions," Grudzinskas means anything that would cause a family "severe distress" such as, well, the wrong hair color. Seriously. According to Grudzinskas hair color "can be a cause of bullying which can lead to suicide. With the agreement of the HFEA, I will [screen for hair color]."

This story coincided with a series of stories here in the United States that paid long-belated attention to the use of genetic testing to eliminate children with down syndrome in utero. A recent New York Times story entitled "Genetic Testing + Abortion = ???" discussed "the ethics of choosing, or not choosing, certain kinds of children."

As the Times put it:

Abortion rights supporters — who believe that a woman has the right to make decisions about her own body — have had to grapple with the reality that the right to choose may well be used selectively to abort fetuses deemed genetically undesirable. And many are finding that, while they support a woman's right to have an abortion if she does not want to have a baby, they are less comfortable when abortion is used by women who don't want to have a particular baby.

I said "coincided" not "coincidence." As I get older, I increasingly agree with "V," the anti-hero of "V For Vendetta," when he said that "there are no coincidences, only the illusion of coincidence." This comfortable illusion enables us to ignore or deny that there's a message (a warning?) for us in all of these stories.

Someone (God) and/or something (our consciences) are trying to get out attention before our momentum down the slippery slope that King alluded to becomes irreversible. Grudzinskas' candor and the "discomfort" felt by the women in the Times' story are an invitation to come and reason together while it's still possible.

We, thankfully, aren't living in a world where a prospective parent's ideas about what would or wouldn't be "distressing" determines who lives and who dies. Yet. Besides the qualms the Times described, the technology isn't there, yet.

While virtually none of the curative promises associated with embryonic stem-cell research have been fulfilled, we are making progress towards learning which genes are associated with which conditions.

That's not the same thing as saying "X gene causes Y condition" but it's good enough for what we will most likely wind up doing with the information: Since the cheapest way to treat a condition is to make sure that the person with the condition is never born, the temptation to pull a "Gattaca," and weed out "imperfections" will prove almost irresistible, especially when it's cloaked in the language of "compassion."

What do we do about it? I'm not sure except that if we are intent on going to Hell it shouldn't be because Christians didn't make a few things clear along the way — things that should not only be clear to Christians but also to the kinds of "noble pagans" that Dante depicted as dwelling in Limbo where they dwelt in natural happiness: "a 10-star resort where the breezes are always balmy, the beer is always cold and the conversation always stimulating."¹

First, suffering and (even) death isn't the worst thing that can happen to a person — living in a way that denies their humanity and renders them little more than an especially clever ape is worse. It's telling (or at least should be) that anthropologists cite caring for individuals who could no longer, through disease or injury, take care of themselves as evidence of the proximity of non-human species, such as Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) or Japanese Macaques (Macaca fuscata) to modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens).

Similarly, the conviction that "the doer of injustice is more miserable than the sufferer" is something that both Christians and noble pagans can agree upon. Or, as Mother Theresa put it, "it is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish."

The poverty that Mother Theresa spoke of was a spiritual poverty in which you reduce yourself to little more than a collection of needs and desires. Even worse — at least for the Christians — is that you wind up denying Jesus' resurrection and triumph over death by living in a way that says that all that matters is what happens on this side of the grave.

Another thing that should be pointed out is that few of us are honest, especially to ourselves, about our motives. In his comments on the aforementioned Times article, Julian Sanchez of Reason magazine wrote that "there's just nothing wrong with [weeding out certain traits in the population or promoting others] per se, insofar as it just means people not wanting their future children to suffer disabilities."

When I read that I couldn't decide which was worse: that Sanchez expected us to think that "compassion" was the motivation behind the "weeding out" (his term, not mine) described in the article or that he believed it himself. Not because I think that the people he's referring to are particularly evil but because I know they're human.

There's a word for people who, when confronted with knowledge that will change their lives forever and deprive them of the aspirations that most of us in the West take for granted, don't hesitate to say "Thy will be done": saints. The rest of us need some time to get used to the idea before we give faith a fighting chance and dance with the partner life gave us.

I understand why people feel overwhelmed by the prospect — not to mention the experience — of caring for a child with disabilities. I also understand what it's like to live in a world where the signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio is so low that we scarcely know ourselves — certainly not well enough to see through our rationalizations and anxieties. (People who do, the monks featured in the film "Into Great Silence," are the subject of my next Boundless piece.)

This combination makes it easier to convince ourselves that we're doing the compassionate thing when what we're really doing is the scared human thing. There's nothing wrong with being scared or having doubts about your ability to cope. What's wrong is acting on those fears and doubts and congratulating ourselves on our "compassion" and "courage." That's the kind of poverty that no amount of money can eradicate.

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NOTES

1. Richard Umbers, "What Happened to Limbo," Mercatornet, 11 May 2007