“Better” Children

Paradox of Parenthood

“We love our children unconditionally, just as they are, yet we are constantly doing everything in our power to get them to be different, to change for the better.”

What are some ways we can make our children better?

We can work with the inborn “equipment.”

OR

We can change the inborn “equipment.”

Working With The Inborn Equipment

Parents can try to improve children by working with their inborn capacities.

By using practice or training, parents can improve specific native gifts (musical, artistic, athletic, etc.)

They can stimulate interest, develop tastes, and enlarge horizons through reading, travel, and exposure to culture.

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Parents can try improve their moods, attitudes, and their behavior through use of our time-honored methods of child rearing and education.

OR…

We Can Just Drug Them Up

Opportunities to control and modify behavior through the use of drugs are growing rapidly and the young but expanding field of neuroscience promises vast increases in understanding the genetic and neuro-chemical contributions to behavior and comparable increases in our ability to alter it, safely and effectively.

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In many cases these drugs are used to help fix a problem or disorder, but they can also be used to help children become better then well.

For example, Ritalin has been used to bring up the performance of ADHD patients to normal or near-normal levels, and bring those of normal subjects to above-normal levels.

Ethical Concerns

Not surprisingly, the pursuit of better behaved and more competent children through the use of drugs has raised considerable ethical concerns.

We will discuss these concerns in the discussion portion of our class today.

Changing The Inborn Equipment

Rather than waiting for the child to be born and then trying to fix them, there is the option of trying to fix them before they are even born.

Technical Possibilities for Changing The Inborn Equipment

Fixing Up

Choosing In

Screening Out

Directed Mating

Fixing Up An unlikely technique for producing better children

involves using directed genetic change to change the genetic makeup of a child before its born in order to produce certain desired improvements.

This however, would require identification of all of the specific variants of genes whose presence or absence correlates with certain traits.

Also many desired traits are greatly influenced by the environment.

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Because of these reasons, it is likely that the use of directed genetic change to achieve “designer babies” will remain purely a fantasy.

Screening Out

In this technique parents use prenatal genetic screening by amniocentesis or chorionic villus before giving birth which has commonly been used to give parents the opportunity to avoid the sorrows and burdens of raising children with severe genetic and chromosomal disorders.

Using Prenatal Diagnosis to get a better child

Prenatal diagnosis permits the weeding out, through abortion, of those fetuses carrying undesired genetic traits which means that parents, that are willing, could continually abort fetuses until they had one they were satisfied with.

Using prenatal diagnosis could not help to optimize a child beyond what the parents have contributed to the fetus.

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Because this method is a weeding-out procedure its potential to select “better than normal” babies is minimal so it is unlikely that it will ever be effective or widely used as a method to get “better” children.

Choosing In This process involves the use of in vitro fertilization

and preimplantation genetic diagnosis allowing the screening of embryos for the presence or absence of certain genetic markers and then the selective transfer of those embryos that are up to the parents standard.

Currently this process is used as a method of disease avoidance but it would require no change in technique for this to be used for baby improvement.

And my personal favorite…

Directed Mating

This process involves choosing superior mating partners or sperm donors with the assumption that individuals with some superior natural ability or accomplishment are genetically better endowed and that mating with them would increase the odds of getting superior children.

Now lets talk about it