Why is it that now, at a time when “hope” is supposed to still be resilient over despair, there would be a thriving market for choosing to love a child who looks more like you, or perhaps more like someone more aesthetically normative than your spouse? (It might be worth noting that the man now running the free world was beloved by a mother and grandmother who did not share his supposedly relevant “predictive genomics.”)
Rather than condemning the choosers, I want to ask about the context in which the choice is made, and why other choices just seem less attractive. Why does the expenditure of time and effort involved in pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) on embryos seem more worthwhile than the time and effort to prepare to adopt one of the thousands of children or teenagers waiting to be received out of foster care?