Cosmetic and Genetic Surgical Fixes

Let’s say you’re attracted to the most beautiful girl at your school or workplace. She has a cute, delicate nose and perfect teeth. In every way this sweet gal exceeds even the high standards of beauty, brains, and loving personality as that imaginary princess from your dreams. She has been magically transformed into a real, live woman and she is as attracted to you as you are her! You two start dating and eventually marry. Six. Nine, a full year, or five years later, she gives birth to a baby girl, your lovely little daughter, with an enormous hook nose, crooked alligator teeth, and an elbow growing out of her forehead. Trying to comfort you, a friend at work shows you a photo from a medical book he has at home. At first, you thought it was a picture of your new infant daughter, but then realized it was much older than that. It was a photo of your wife taken shortly after she was born. There was another photo of her taken when she was 18 years old and showing how corrective surgery was successful. The surgical procedures to correct her alligator teeth, hook nose, and forehead elbow made medical news worldwide. Now your baby girl will need to undergo the same expensive, painful, and time-consuming surgery and orthodontal work as her mother did two-and-a-half decades ago. Your wife had a secret past she never told you about and now it has come home to roost and feed on your innocent daughter’s sure to be painful and unhappy childhood as well as your bank account.

Worse, what if you, the husband, carried a genetic defect that produced offspring with a condition that was certain to be fatal unless it could be repaired with risky surgery while you were in your teens? Would it have been fair to disclose that possibility to your wife before she became a mother? What if her baby was born with a malformed body, brain, ears, eyes, spinal bifida, or some other serious genetically caused condition? If anyone knew about this possibility in advance, shouldn’t they have a moral and legal obligation to inform all the affected parties in advance? Should a dishonest person who decided to ignore the information and proceed with the pregnancy and birth be held legally liable? Should they be charged, tried, and punished in criminal court?

The list of what-ifs goes on and on, especially in wealthy capitalist countries such as the United States where many people are able and willing to spend any amount of money to fix genetically inherited cosmetic and even physically debilitating problems. The problem is the absence of a legal mandate requiring informed notification of the condition to all persons who may be directly affected. Instead, parents and doctors can just shrug their shoulders and write off the awful experience as “God’s Will.”

A legal requirement should carry severe penalties such as imprisonment and full legal liability and should stay in force until medical science is able to screen for all such conditions and reliably employ genetic engineering to inactivate and correct the responsible genes. Otherwise, whether desired by the parents or not, the pregnancy and birth should not be permitted.

Geneticists warn that if we keep repairing birth defects without at least sterilizing the infants as well as their parents, most children born 200 years from now will suffer serious birth defects. That is a tragedy that can be prevented.

As far as strictly cosmetic surgery for adults, if the undesirable physical appearance to be changed is genetic and could be passed on to future generations, such surgery should be unlawful unless the parents who carry the defective genes agree to sterilization of themselves as well as as well as the child. Men and women who surgically alter their appearance but pose no genetic danger to future generations should not be required to be sterilized, but they may be charged with fraud if they fail to fully inform prospective partners of their altered appearance and reasons for doing so. The people who pay for the expensive face lift to make them look 15 years younger may die long before their deceived spouses expected.

Our primary focus should always be science-based and on the future. How will the increasing number of newborn infants with serious genetically inherited disorders affect future generations? What is our moral responsibility to those generations who come into existence long after we have gone? Just as our failure to do anything to effectively address the current crisis of global warming and climate change, the additional shirking of our responsibility to future generations by ignoring the danger of genetically inheritable defects will pose disastrous consequences.