You are going to be a parent.
Modern science is your guide, IVF your chosen method, the aim being multiple foetuses for maximum choice.
Clutching the Book of Life - as the map of the human genome is known - you ponder your ideal child. There's Foetus A, which even as a mere mass of cells already has a bad report card: a genetic disposition to criminal behaviour. Select or dispatch? What of Foetus B? It has an excellent chance of being born with perfect pitch, but the gene map also points to depression. Move along. Foetus C? Gene markers for exceptional athleticism, and high marks for brain power to boot.
This is an exaggerated scenario of course, but it is not science fiction, and nor is it too far removed from the kinds of debates we face as we confront the choices scientific advances are delivering: gender selection of human beings, with selection for birth based on screening for not just major diseases or a preference for a particular gender, but also for personality traits and other skills or weaknesses, from a long-distance running ability to a dangerously short fuse.
For Oxford-based expatriate philosopher and ethicist Julian Savulescu, this is a debate whose time has come, and one in which he is a fierce advocate for letting science speak for itself and leaving individuals to decide for themselves how they use the information.
Savulescu says local laws are too conservative, more so than in the US but in keeping with European attitudes. He warns that one reason for Australians to focus on how to deal with genetic selection is China's ambitions. 'China is investing hundreds of millions of dollars looking for the genes that are associated with intelligence and they're going to be doing this sort of testing in the future,'' he says. ''There won't be any of the sort of constraints that we have in Australia and Europe.'
Savulescu describes what sounds like a relatively benign discovery: that singers with perfect pitch may have a musical marker on their personal genetic map. He also details what he calls compelling cases that already exist for genetic influence over behaviours such as 'poor impulse control'.
In a discussion built on more confronting scenarios - assuming the discovery of a gay gene, for example, or of genetic signposts responsible for different racial traits - Savulescu is adamant the rights of the individual to choose must be paramount.
'If people who are fundamentalist Christians want to have a child who isn't disposed to being gay, then they should be free to do that. They're not harming the child. They're selecting between different children that they could otherwise naturally have had.''
On the race question, he says a mixed-race couple, for example, should be free to favour or reject racial characteristics such as a dominant skin colour. 'Once you get more and more information about the genetic basis of different racial characteristics, you'll of course be able to select to have more or less of that trait. So if you've got a mixed-race couple … you will be able to select embryos out more or less [for] one of those that you want.
Savulescu knows exactly the standard reaction to these bold and blunt views, having already stirred up debate in Britain.
'People immediately say, 'that's what the Nazis did and that's eugenics'. It is indeed eugenics but so is testing for Down syndrome or cystic fibrosis or any disease. That's also eugenics.'
Read the Sydney Morning Herald article in full here: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/ethical-minefield-of-parents-in-control-20130913-2tq3b.html
And an updated news item from 2 September 2015 here: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/calls-for-ivf-laws-to-be-changed-to-take-advantage-of-gene-editing-technique-10481976.html
Is Savulescu right? If the technology exists to screen for personality, intelligence, skin colour etc should parents have the freedom to choose the sort of child they wish to have?
Is there some sort of obligation as a future parent to have the 'best' possible child you can?
Is this eugenics or just parental free choice?
What do you think?
Image source
It is proposed that parent should be able to choose specific genes for their child