Building a Better Baby
October 22, 2007

Sunday morning, CBS News ran a segment called "Building a Better Baby." The subject was PGD, or Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis, a way of analyzing the genetic material of a in vitro embryo to select out "unfit" embryos, whether it be for genetic predisposition for disease, sex, etc. The piece is introduced by saying that there are "some very real ethical questions," but they never seem to get around to asking a whole lot of tough questions. In the end, the important limitation turns out to be the state of technology and not any real ethical question.

To CBS's credit, they do bring in an historian, Wendy Kline of the University of Cincinnati, who talks about America's earlier attempt at eugenics in the 1920s. But the story almost seems to lament the end of America's eugenics movement.

As proof of their genetic fitness, winners would get a medal, complete with a golden baby, proclaiming their "goodly heritage." The contests fell out of favor here during the 1930s, when a much more disturbing program of genetic screening began … in Nazi Germany

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