The whole notion that we should be looking for ways to "fix" homosexual orientation in the womb - as if it were a birth defect or congenital disease - is based on the notion that homosexuality is inherently wrong or damaging. It's as disturbing as the "science" of eugenics was decades ago. For those not familiar with the term, see this wikipedia article.

Sure, you can say that homosexuality should be "fixed" in the womb because that poor baby will grow up to suffer from discrimination, so making them straight will do them a favor. You might as well say that we would be doing a favor to black people by altering their children in the womb so that they'll be white and not suffer from racial discrimination.

In other words, the problems of homosexual and minority individuals are not congenital or physical but cultural - and of course the real kicker is that they're other people's cultural problems.

I agree. Somewhere in the article a minister suggested homosexuality was a disorder that should be corrected. I realize that there are always going to be people who don't approve of gays, but for me this falls under the heading of creating a master race. It's no better than trying to dictate the sex of the baby before it's born.

It’s no different from wanting to cure Down syndrome. From a scientific and evolutionary point of view being gay is a defect with as they would go extinct. This is why I think it is not so much a genetic defect ad evolution would have corrected it by now and that it is more a developmental defect. There is a huge difference between creating a master race and curing diseases. The question is will people start to view gayness as a disease? Thanks to the gay community in fighting the moral fight by saying they can’t help it and were born that way leads right into the disease debate. Most people do not think that being gay is natural or normal and have come to accept gays precisely because they think it wasn’t their fault.

Well yes, ethically and morally speaking, you are both correct. But the idea that eugenics is something from the past, is not accurate at all. Though doctors and scientists will never use that word, eugenics is alive and well, and a multi-billion dollar industry. It is not a matter of "if" it will occur, but more of when and on how large a scale.

Science is growing at such a fast pace, law and ethics cannot possibly keep up. Progressives mock Dubya over his stem cell research objections and his positions on abortion rights, but are taken aback when confronted with the possible unitended consequences of science left unchecked. If parents "choose" not to have homosexual children, and the technology is available, as the article contends, there will be nothing you, or anyone else could do about it. They don't even have to perfect the hormone technology, just the testing. Like current methods of "selecting" gender in some cultures (perhaps even our own), people could simply abort and try again.

Of course the overall threat might be overblown, as only those with access to good health care coverage would be able to participate in this process. The passing of Universal Health Care could change that. The possibilities for political wedge issues abound.

So how much time do Law and Medical Schools devote to teaching ethics?

A Brave New World indeed.

There’s no reason to presume that natural selection would in all cases act to cull alleles predisposing to a homosexual orientation from a gene pool. The simplest alternative case would be if sexual orientation was a function of a dominant/recessive pair of alleles, with homosexual phenotype recessive; even if they confered a decrease in fitness homosexual alleles could still be selected for in a population if they were genetically linked to alleles conferring a greater increase in fitness.

Re: tjcerveza

You make a good point, but remember that there's a distinction between science completely without ethics and science with ethics that are different from yours. Some people may object to using embryos for stem cell research, whatever the fate of those embryos might otherwise have been. Some people object to throwing up roadblocks on an avenue of research that may, in time, result in treatments for cancer and juvenile onset diabetes.

I wonder, if we looked at people who were for or against stem cell research and for or against "fixing" homosexuality in the womb, what kind of overlap would we see?

That is an interesting question.

Stem Cell Research has very wide appeal, because almost everyone's life has been touched by having someone they hold dear, suffer or die from illness or injury. Most people who do object, are not objecting because of the research, but instead, on how the stem cells are obtained. It is a blow-back effect from the battle over abortion rights. As the technology develops, making the harvesting of fetal stem cells obsolete, the issue will disappear. Of course, the research itself may initiate other ethical questions most of us have never thought about. Or, maybe not. Only time will tell.

This issue is different. First, for most people, it is not even on their radar. So far, it has little coverage in main stream media, and strong opinions and positions have yet to be drawn. Unless you are gay, or have a family member or friend who is gay, there will probably not be the same ownership of the issue. There are many people who identifiy themselves as progressive in public, but it would be difficult to determine what types of personal choices a person or couple might make in the privacy of a doctors office.

Medical technology is at the point, that in the not too distant future, what was once considered science fiction, will be common place. A lot is already in practice. The customization of one's offspring is no longer unthinkable. Forms of it are already being done. No one blinks when talking about eliminating birth defects or genetic pre-dispositions to disease. But as we master the genome and other scientific methods, there will be many other commercial applications. Medicine may be a science, but it is also big business. If there is a market for something, you can bet someone will develop it.

Resisting such "progress" will be difficult. It is very easy to brand someone a ludite when you have a multi-million dollar PR machine backing you.