"Turning to the woman, God said, 'Because you have sinned, childbearing will be very painful for you. Your desire will be for your husband, and you will be subject to him.' Then God said to Adam, 'Because you listened to your wife when you knew better and you ate fruit from the tree I told you not to eat from, you will live a life of toil. The soil will be hard to work and sorrow will follow you throughout your life. You will contend with thorns and thistles, and you will have to grow vegetables to survive. By the sweat of your brow you will have to earn your bread, and it will be a struggle to provide for yourself and your family. When your life is over, you will be buried in the ground out of which you were taken. You are made of dust and to dust you will return.'
"God said to His Son, 'Man was like us, but he has changed. He now knows good and evil, so he's infected with sin. If we leave him in the garden and he continues to eat from the Tree of Life, he will never die, and he and his descendants will live in sin forever. We can't let this happen.' So God sent Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden to till the soil. There they would live and work until they died. Near the garden He stationed angels whose beams of light looked like flaming swords, so people would not eat of the Tree of Life again." [1]
Control the body, control the mind. Try to imagine a world with no offspring. You won't get very far. Such a future seems inconceivable. Even the most dystopian of scenarios [2] employs the corpus as the locus of inscription—ethics and ego—with which to judge the past, predict the future and arbitrate over an ever mounting inventory of existential regret. The story of Eve, as a juxtaposition of innocence and beauty with darkness and isolation, lends itself well to matrimonial legacy—can't live with it; can't die without it. Companionship in Eden begins with suspicion and ends with mistrust and denial, from Adam blaming Eve to Eve blaming the serpent, to God, the master scientist, scapegoating his creation for the ills of a world He Himself created. Ages later, fire, electricity and the Internet expose the old order: follow the rules and find your mate and you'll be fine; break them and you will find yourself alone with no-one to take care of you—doomed, banished from beauty and estranged from excellence. This could be why none of us wants to be alone.
Our sense of mortality is linked to our offspring. Personal legacy—along with vitality, civic responsibility and social status—is often presented in terms of how many children we have—as if a greater number of seeds in the celestial garden will somehow increase our chances of tilling the soil there. In Biblical terms, the privilege of procreation began as a curse, and our mortality became a prominent factor in aligning our temperament with what we expected from the world and from ourselves. Ever since Eve was banished from Eden for eating from the Tree of Knowledge, humans have wrestled with the concept of enlightenment; how much knowledge is too much knowledge? Ideas of mortality, immortality and the afterlife remain contentious, as does the institution of marriage itself, whose tenets often pull at our instincts, sometimes rationally, sometimes not. Yet, the profound sense of entitlement that came with the institution of marriage is stronger than ever, to those whose success is at least partially defined by it. Now, just as reproductive rights take center stage, it's fitting for us to ask, what if our preoccupation with the afterlife suddenly vanished? If we had no choice but to embrace the "here and now", what kinds of lives would we lead? Would we be more or less in tune with one another? Would we be more or less inclined to feel, to act, to move beyond fear in order to address inequality, injustice and evil?
If procreation (childbirth, legacy) represents the locus of choice (with all other choices as inferior), and the state champions the institution that legitimizes procreation (marriage, offspring, estates and assets), it would seem that individual choice (what is right for the individual) is supplanted by reproductive choice (what is right for the offspring). This represents a displacement of importance and responsibility from "self" to "future-self". The concept of choice then becomes problematic, in that the absence of choice presents an obvious paradox when applied to global disparity and overpopulation. Further complicating the matter is the increasing inability of the human body, resilient as it may be, to carry our genes forward through space and time unscathed.
We are, at this very moment, redefining democracy, autonomy and privacy, as we navigate a digital age governed by concerns around mobility, transparency and accountability. As an obstacle to biotechnological innovation, the sanctity of birth presents a Kobayashi Maru—a "no-win" scenario—for those who would seek to contain population growth while at the same time ensure the current conditions of production, not to mention preserve the overall genetic fitness of the species. Because popular religious notions of procreation and mortality seem impervious the change, the greater lot of humanity is presented with the illusion of choice.
Reproductive choice then becomes an entry point for discussion around the viability, power and mechanism of a resurgent eugenics movement. Take fetal rights and homosexuality, for example. Would you change the genetic makeup of your unborn child, if you could, to prevent him or her from having to grow up gay? If given the choice, some parents would say yes. As bioethicist Francis Fukuyama suggests, a new "kinder, gentler eugenics" may result from seemingly compassionate choices like this one, made by parents and other guardians who wish to spare their offspring any unnecessary discomfort or pain an unsympathetic world might offer [3].
Analogous to the story of Eve is the myth of Prometheus, further illustrating how the gods do not take well to knowledge-seeking and innovation. Neo-eugenics represents a promethean form of enlightenment—a risk taken to avert imminent and irreversible disaster, but also one that represents a permanent dismantling of the species, should it fail. Assuming current projections are accurate and we jump from 7 billion to 8 billion by the year 2025 [4], how practical is it for us to continue having children?
To reach any consensus on childbirth restriction, we must circumvent a resurgence of eugenics in the traditional sense and break free from antiquated religious beliefs. But how might the social landscape look without marriage, the nuclear family and a solid model for procreation? Is such a future even possible? Furthermore, how will artificial intelligence, A-life and longevity affect our desire for progeny, our concept of mortality?
(Part 2 of this article considers Xq28, the "gay gene", and how neo-eugenics is likely to be expressed through a new form of promethean science.)
Notes
[1] The Bible, Genesis 3:16-24
[2] The 2006 novel by P.D. James, Children of Men, describes an infertile future where suicide, despair and conflict escalate, just as the last generation to be born becomes adult. The premise was so disturbing Hollywood made it a movie the same year.
[3] Fukuyama, Francis. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002) Picador: New York p. 87
[4] United Nations http://www.un.org/en/ - or - Washington Times http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/oct/31/various-7-billionth-babies-celebrated-worldwide/
Images
[1] Adam and Eve, Sistine Chapel: Expulsion from Eden, 340 KB (Michelangelo, Wikimedia Commons) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Forbidden_fruit.jpg
[2] Overpopulation, 88 KB (unknown, LAF) http://filipspagnoli.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/overpopulation-a-collection-of-images/
[3] Prometheus, 68 KB (Theodoor Rombouts, Wikimedia Commons) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Theodoor_Rombouts_%281597-1637%29_-_Prometheus_-_KMSK_Brussel_25-02-2011_12-45-49.jpg
KEYWORDS: afterlife, childbirth, China one-child policy, choice, curse, eugenics, gay gene, immortality, knowledge, Kobayashi Maru, liberal eugenics, mortality, neo-eugenics, power, prometheus, punishment, reproduction, sanctity, scientific progress
