In the Table Talk, one of the recurring thoughts I had was about how genetic engineering could potentially impact disability. As many disabilities, or predispositions to becoming disabled, are genetic, it seems to me that soon we will have the ability to them at the earliest stages of fetal development, and perhaps even “correct” them. This does, I feel, raise important issues regarding how we as a society should treat disability. For many, disability is a net-negative, even a tragedy, something to be avoided and, if unavoidable, managed and mitigated through medical care until “normalcy” is once again achieved. Yet, for me (a person with a disability), I know that my disability is one of the main reasons I am even here at Cornell. While it certainly is not all sunshine and roses, I would not be the person I am today if it weren’t for my disability. With my life experience in mind, I have a lot of concerns about just how far we will go in with genetics with regards to disability. On the other hand, it is the desire of every parent to ensure the best life, as they define it, for their children, and who am I (or anyone else) to say what they can and cannot do for their child? These are both sides of argument that will need to be considered as medical technology advances. I can only wonder what the outcome will be.
Rose Scholars Fall 2018
Endless possibilities
In my opinion, I believe the technology to identify any fatal abnormalities in fetuses and correct those to ensure the child will be able to survive should absolutely be utilized to save countless lives. However, while we should try to correct fatal disorders, non-fatal disorders is a different story. I believe that in some cases correcting non-fatal disorders will still significantly improve the quality of life of that person, but even this begs the question as to how we define quality of life. I think we should be wary about using this technology to simply make people’s lives easier, because each parent could have a different idea of what they want for their child. Thus, this technology could easily be used for selecting desired traits in humans, which would only exaggerate the inequities already present in the world today. Overall I think we should pursue this technology for the purpose of saving people’s lives, but there should be strict regulations governing the process to ensure it is not abused.
The way that technology seems to be headed is to completely eradicate genetic illnesses or anything that is seen as imperfect in order to produce the “perfect” specimen. We seem to be racing against time to artificially create human beings superior to ourselves. Of course if there is a possibility to help parents have a child free of genetic illnesses, then why not use the improvements within genetic engineering, but at what point should we continue to resist its inevitable advancement?