CHILDREN HAVE SUCH A DELICIOUS WAY OF IGNORING ALL SOCIAL conventions to ask the obvious question. That’s what happened the other day: a child stopped on the street and said to me, “Hey, mister, how can you walk with your eyes closed?”
Evolution selected the epicanthic fold of eyelids characteristic of my Mongoloid ancestors. Those fat-filled lids worked well in frigid climates, insulating eyeballs against the cold while blocking out a lot of the reflected light from ice and snow. All you need is a slit to let light into the pupil—my field of vision is just as great as that of the “big eyes” of the West.
But what is functional and adaptive biologically is not necessarily acceptable culturally. Small eyes are not in vogue, and Western standards of beauty are pervasive. Even in Japan today, it’s not uncommon to see people walking around with one eye bandaged because they’ve had a cosmetic operation to put a fold into the eyelid to give the illusion of bigger eyes. (They do one eye at a time.)
I’m not immune. In the years immediately following the incarceration of Japanese Canadians as enemy aliens, my eyes were a great source of shame to me. I would have given anything to have had an eye operation. (I wanted to dye my hair and change my name too.) I’m terribly self-conscious without my glasses, because I live with the illusion that the frames make my eyes look bigger. So there you have the primal essence of my hang-ups.
You may ask, “Who cares?” or “So what?” Well, I’m sure a lot of people have their own personal sensitivities to what they perceive as blemishes. After each of my children was born and I was assured they were normal, the first things I checked out were their eyes and noses. Today, people deliberately limit the number of children they have, and hence each birth has become vested with far greater importance. We want so much for our children and would like them to start out with the maximum of advantages. So if music affects the fetus, we’ll play Beethoven every chance we get. What will happen as techniques for monitoring our babies increase the kinds of traits that are detectable and alterable before birth? If a physical feature has come to be regarded as an impediment, imaginary or not, most of us would like to avoid it in our children, if possible.
Already the crudest kind of prenatal diagnosis by amniocentesis and chorion biopsy allows a quick detection of sex. In clinics in India and China, girls (who have an XX chromosome constitution) are not as desirable as boys (who have an XY chromosome makeup), so through abortion females are being “terminated.” Their “defect” is the absence of a Y chromosome. Sex selection by abortion happens here too, though doctors are understandably reluctant to discuss it. Consider a family in which three or four girls have been born. The parents would like to have a son, and if the mother is in her late thirties, she is eligible to have amniocentesis (the recovery of fetal fluid and cells from the amniotic sac of a pregnant woman) to check for Down’s syndrome in the fetus. After the test is done, parents can ask what the sex of the fetus is. If the fetus is a normal female, this family might contemplate an abortion in order to try for a boy. This does occur in North America.
The problem for society is that once the technologies become available, all kinds of unanticipated uses are thought up. Amniocentesis yields a crude biological profile of the fetus. Such information has allowed parents who carry genes for a known hereditary defect to risk pregnancy, knowing that a defect can be detected in the test and a decision can be made whether to abort. Access to the test has resulted in the birth of babies who otherwise would never have been deliberately conceived, and a great deal of worry and the burden of a defective child have been avoided. There are many terrible neurological and anatomical defects that can now be circumvented, but for many (including me) abortion of a Down’s syndrome fetus takes us into a troubling “gray zone.” I know families that have been devastated by the birth of a Down’s child, but have also known others whose lives have been enriched in many ways by a Down’s infant. Once we have options, we are faced with the terrible decision of where we draw the line and what we are willing to tolerate.
Now with ultrasonography, fetoscopy, chorion biopsy, and restriction enzyme mapping, techniques are rapidly evolving to provide very sophisticated insights into the genetic makeup of fetuses. And if Down’s syndrome raises difficulties, what of those diseases in which sound minds are accompanied by progressively worsening physical conditions—muscular dystrophy, hemophilia, sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, multiple sclerosis, and others? Would those who suffer from these debilitating diseases and their family members prefer that they had not been born? And as technology improves, what will we decide about scoliosis, diabetes, cleft lip and palate, albinism?
Already the U.S. government has given its approval to begin gene therapy, the deliberate introduction of DNA to alter the genetic makeup of children. Like the technologies of prenatal diagnosis, this will open up an awesome array of possibilities that many will find irresistible. I am glad that my reproductive days are over so that I don’t have to deal with these very real possibilities. For if the option had been available, would I have been able to resist tampering with the conformation of my children’s eyes? u