Sequencing the Stork: How Genetics is Unraveling the Secrets of Reproduction and Changing the Nature of Parenting

The overarching goal in Sequencing the Stork is to investigate the meaning of “good parenting” in an age of genomics. Can knowing all about your child’s genome make you a better parent? Should prospective parents seek to select and even alter their potential child’s genomes? And how does the presence of these new powers alter both the experience of parenting and our societal and perhaps even legal notions of what good parenting involves? These questions have presented themselves to me during my own life of becoming and being a parent, my experience of the beauty and freedom of not choosing or altering the genetic makeup of my child or not being responsible for how she is. And these questions are also the bread and butter of the last twenty years of my professional life: they intersect perfectly with my background in law, where the idea of the best interests of the child has a specific meaning, and my research in bioethics, where the ethical, legal and social implications of genomics for patients, clinicians and policy makers have been a major focus of my career.

My goal is to investigate these questions, and to develop a way through them that draws on the best of what the science can offer while preserving or even enhancing the positive qualities of parenting as clarified in the empirical literature and presented in philosophical and bioethical analysis. Of particular interest to me is the notion that parenting is a role and activity with meaning beyond the best interests of the child, whether that meaning comes from conceptions of familial well-being or is grounded in the balancing of children’s and parents’ interests. 

Genetic science promises to free parents from the strictures of misfortune and enable them to gain some control over the health and well begin of their children. This book takes the benefits of that potential seriously, but also considers ways in which information and control may not be freeing, but could instead introduce new restrictions on how people procreate, how they behave during pregnancy and how they parent. The book develops the possibility that the geneticization of procreation can only be freeing if parents are allowed to maintain some of the mystery and freedom of parenthood. Ultimately, the book resists the notion that a good parent necessarily avails herself of all that science has to offer when it comes to the creation of her child and the practice of parenting. Perhaps the greatest challenge for the book lies in how it addresses the flip side of that resistance—when parents and prospective parents eschew genomics in some or all aspects of their parenting. And so the book will also grapple with challenges to its central thesis.