Bailey on Fukuyama's 'eugenics'

Looks like I'm not the only one who interprets over-the-top regulation of human biotech as a form of eugenics. Reason science correspondent Ronald Bailey has penned a piece in which he warns, "Francis Fukuyama wants to control your reproductive decisions."

In the article, titled "Medievalizing Biotech Regulation," Bailey describes Fukuyama's recent initiative to create a regulatory agency in the United States that would be modeled after the British Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HEFA). This new agency would regulate the safety and efficacy of new biotechnologies and rule on their ethical merits. Fukuyama argues that it's time for "social control."

More specifically,

Fukuyama explained that the new agency would regulate anything having to do with assisted reproduction techniques (ART). This would include IVF, ooplasm transfer, sex selection either by pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) or sperm sorting. The agency would also regulate research involving human reproductive tissues including all embryonic stem cell research and anything dealing with human developmental biology....

Fukuyama would completely ban human reproductive cloning, the creation of human animal chimeras for the purpose of reproduction, germline genetic modifications, any procedure that would alter the genetic relationship of parents to children, and the patenting of human embryos.

I'm not opposed to regulatory agencies in principle; institutions such as these are both necessary and fairly inevitable. What concerns me, however, is when extreme bioconservatives like Fukuyama take the initiative. These regulatory precedents are dangerously constrictive. It is Fukuyama, after all, who has made it painfully clear that he is opposed to not just human enhancement, but life extending technologies as well.

As Bailey points out in his article, these regulatory bodies often function as bureaucratic obstructions to research and development. Moreover, when given too much political clout, and if guided by anachronistic notions of human reproduction and biology, these agencies may also act in a way that's reminiscent of 20th century eugenics.

Ultimately, Fukuyama's agency will work to enforce a preconceived, non-normative and state imposed vision of human reproduction and health in general.