The Deliberate Crippling of Children

It's not my headline. It's Slate's headline. For an article on the politics of baby-making.

Standard liberal-like articles talk with the handwringing gestures about the horrors of babies and eugenics. Don't get me wrong -- I think there REALLY is a problem here. This particular article, however, talks about the reverse: the deliberate crippling of children.

This is the essay in full, with Slate's own bold face type:

Several U.S. fertility clinics admit they've helped couples deliberately select defective embryos. According to a new survey report, "Some prospective parents have sought [preimplantation genetic diagnosis] to select an embryo for the presence of a particular disease or disability, such as deafness, in order that the child would share that characteristic with the parents. Three percent of IVF-PGD clinics report having provided PGD to couples who seek to use PGD in this manner." Since 1) the United States has more than 400 fertility clinics, 2) more than two-thirds that answered the survey offer PGD, and 3) some clinics that have done it may not have admitted it, the best guess is that at least eight U.S. clinics have done it. Old fear: designer babies. New fear: deformer babies. (For Human Nature's take, including more findings from the survey, click here.)

I'm shocked. Not at the choices some parents have made, but at the way in which the article is written. DEFORMER BABIES? Deliberately defective embryos?

It's a sad world.