This bit of Entiltement News is not a new phenomenon, but illustrates the eugenics core that lies at the heart of facilitated reproduction. A sperm/egg bank has opened offering gametes of beautiful people for sale. From the story
The Beautiful Baby service – which is also available to non-members – was created for people who want to maximize their chances of having good looking children. Managing director Greg Hodge said: “BeautifulPeople.com has launched a fertility introduction service to help members and non-members alike procreate. There are no financial benefits for us in doing so – we are simply responding to a demand for attractive donors. Every parent would like their child to be blessed with many fine attributes, attractiveness being one of the most sought after. For a site with members who resemble Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Angelina Jolie you can imagine the demand.”
Shallowness R us. And it ignores the truth that standards of beauty change over time. In my youth, Marilyn Monroe was the epitome of beauty. Today, her voluptuous curves would send her to Jenny Craig!
I once heard a nasty but relevant joke: Marilyn Monroe meets Albert Einstein. “Imagine Albert,” she said in her patented breathless voice. “What a perfect human being we could create if we had a baby that had my looks and your brains!” Eintein chuckled, “But my dear Marilyn,” he said. “The baby could just as easily have my looks and your brains.” (Yes, I know: MM was not really stupid. She lived in a time in which her acting ambitions were thwarted and she was used as a thing by men with power.)
Bottom line: We no longer just feel entitled to a baby, but to the baby we want. This is not healthy for a loving society, for it tends to make our love for children conditional.
June 25th, 2010 | 1:32 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Vince Humphreys, J. Robert Howell. J. Robert Howell said: “Beautiful” Sperm and Eggs for Sale http://bit.ly/bykDPW eugenics? [...]
June 25th, 2010 | 1:54 pm
I have to admit that this quote from the article:
Founder Robert Hintze added: “Initially, we hesitated to widen the offering to non-beautiful people. But everyone – including ugly people – would like to bring good looking children in to the world, and we can’t be selfish with our attractive gene pool.”
- pegged my personal repulsiveness meter. This is downright sick. I do get the sense from this article and others that when people want to design their own offspring, it’s for the shallowest of reasons.
June 26th, 2010 | 10:52 am
I hesitate to raise a dissenting voice (largely because I agree that the Beautiful Baby Service is another symptom of the vulgarity and shallowness which has crept into the cultural mainstream) – but it’s important to reiterate that all parents desire children who are intelligent, beautiful and physically healthy and, if they were able to, would always guarantee this outcome. It is even possible to argue that a parent faced with the appropriate technological options is morally obliged to *choose* a child with genetic traits most conducive to happiness. Obviously, the calculus is complex (which genes or traits truly contribute to our long-term psychological well-being?) but nonetheless the moral duty remains. If one is capable of conferring advantages on ones offspring, then one ought to do so. This doesn’t make one’s love conditional on the child’s possession of these advantages (for example, we routinely express our preference for non-FAS babies by urging pregnant women to abstain from alcohol but we do not expect that this recommendation *in itself* will lead them to love babies born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome any less).
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
June 26th, 2010 at 10:56 am
Raven Chukwu: Always feel free to raise a dissenting voice here. I think parents do want that. But I also think that trying to ensure that we get what we want is where we cross a line that leads to very dark places.
June 26th, 2010 | 7:55 pm
I find this disturbing for multiple reasons, but the formation of this business is just a further consolidation of already existing practices and trends.
Some years ago, a woman friend who had for a time worked as a model told me that models would occasionally receive offers to purchase their eggs. And we have heard of the solicitations of women from Ivy League schools to sell their eggs. And then we have the surrogate mother (womb) business in India.
A business like this will have to have a steady supply of eggs from women. How will they assure that? Extracting them is an intrusive and potentially dangerous procedure.
There is an organization which is a coalition of both pro-choice and pro-life women opposed to this practice, but I can’t recall its name offhand.
If this business were to succeed in its objectives, it would just increase the already increasing pressure to conform to a certain cosmetic norm.
I used to sometimes watch the cable show Nip/Tuck, and, regardless of what one might think of its content, I think it offered a pretty good critique of our obsession with a particular standard of physical beauty.
June 28th, 2010 | 4:57 pm
[...] PR Newswire: “www.BeautifulPeople.com, the dating site with a strict ban on ugly people, has launched a virtual sperm and egg bank for people who want to have beautiful babies. … The Beautiful Baby service – which is also available to non-members – was created for people who want to maximize their chances of having good looking children.” | Via Wesley J. Smith [...]
July 2nd, 2010 | 10:23 am
The Global Church…
My blog readers will be interested in your post so added a trackback to it on CatholicTide…
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