CorporealSemiotics:TheBodyoftheText/theTextoftheBody 357
fittingin...notasourceofrecreatingbutabidforcompliance—away
of answering a competitive society's demand to improve our
performanceandperfectournature.(82)Ideally, the new enhancement options are supposed to "cover"
human life in all ages and stages. In reality, and this may be no
coincidence, they have been affecting the human life course rather
unevenly, with a notable emphasis on its two liminal conditions,
reproduction and aging. Concerning the former, the field of
"reprogenetics" (Silver, "Reprogenetics" 375) is by all counts the one
whereenhancementhasmadethedeepestinroadsintothepublicsphere,
intheU.S.andelsewhere.Thestakesinvolvedinnewtechnologiessuch
as pre-natal genetic testing are high, as Jürgen Habermas reminds us in
one of his repeated interventions in the debate. Whether for good or for
bad, the genetic enhancement of people to be tends to subvert "the
taken-for-granted background of our self-understanding as a species"
(Habermas,FutureofHumanNature72).
Issues surrounding the ethics as well as the social and cultural
acceptability of interventions on the genomic level through in vitro
fertilization (IVF) and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) are
often discussed—and very controversially so—under the signal term
"designer babies."^53 Even at this point in time, studies reveal that
parental choices are governed not just by the desire to avoid severe
illnesses in their future children but to select non-health related genetic
features making them tall, strong, intelligent, good-looking, etc.
(Savulescu and Kahane 274-90). Not only in those Asian nation states
whichareroutinelyinthenewsforthepreferenceformalebabiesthere,
the selection option will havewide-ranging consequences,demographic
and cultural. Even though genetically enhanced "children to order" are
not possible just yet, the prospect of being able to make such selections
already catalyzes visions—utopian as well as dystopian—of human
perfection and its pitfalls, of producing "future people" according to
presentstandards(Wilkinson4).
(^53) For an overview of the discussion cf. Wynne Parry's article "Designing Life:
Should Babies Be Genetically Engineered?"LiveScience.Purch, 18 Feb. 2013.
Web.29Feb.2016.