ABSTRACT
Thinking about the Human Genome Project (HGP), not least the vaunted possibility of the “perfect baby”, seems, as we approach the millennium, to be both near and light years away from the spectre of eugenics which has haunted the twentieth century, above all in the hideous episode of Nazism. This new possibility in which intending parents get to choose eye colour, height, intelligence, looks, and so on, is part of a new consumer culture without limits. If you want it, can pay for it, and someone can provide it, then, whatever “it” is, it is yours. A revitalised economic liberalism enthrones the consumer as king-or even queen. Of course, there will be some moral discourse questioning the desirability of letting the market into parenthood, but the ethicists are themselves weakened by their subscription to the thesis of the importance of the market as the chief arbiter of our futures. Thus while tasteless, absurd, even impossible, the dream of the perfect baby takes its place alongside other consumer fantasies, of the perfect house, suit, job, garden, partner, etc. The epitome of this unrestrained consumerism is, as usual, the USA, and it is important not to dismiss or undermine the institutional structures of social solidarity still evident in European countries which, though weakened, still serve as a constraint against the marketisation of everyday life. It is this deteriorating context which makes me increasingly uncomfortable at the ease with which the risk of a new eugenicism paralleling the growth of the new genetics has been dismissed.
