As a medical student, I did Obstetrics Gynecology training in 1973. Afterward, I pursued a career in Internal Medicine and Nephrology and, other than with my wife and two sons, never entered a delivery room or cared for either of the two persons combined in a single pregnancy. The timing of my Obstetrics education, however, must have been propitious. The date should hearken back to a year that still lives in infamy—the year of Roe v. Wade.

Readers of both the academic and popular literature in bioethics will be well aware that genetic and other forms of so-called human enhancement are clearly on the drawing board. No one knows how long it will take to develop these technologies, but they are most certainly coming. Already, of course, through the use of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, human embryos are screened for undesirable genetic traits and embryos with those traits are not transferred to a woman’s uterus—they are discarded or used in embryo-destructive research.