Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, July 14, 1990 TAG: 9007140459
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PATRICIA BRENNAN THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Because of new diagnostic techniques available through amniocentesis, couples can learn whether their unborn child is afflicted with a number of genetic problems from Down's syndrome to cystic fibrosis, the disastrous Tay-Sachs disease, and perhaps one day soon, a gene indicating a predisposition to addiction.
Then the parents may decide whether to abort a fetus that doesn't meet their requirements.
Other prospective parents, seeking pregnancy by artificial insemination, arrive at clinics with shopping lists of traits they want for their child.
The search for the perfect baby is one replete with ethical considerations an earlier generation never had to face. Walters, who both hosts the show and moderates a roundtable panel of experts, said she's particularly fond of "A Perfect Baby."
For one thing, she said, unlike many specials she's hosted, this one is very much hers, having sprung from her memo to ABC News president Roone Arledge.
"This was a show I care about," she said. "I'm more involved in this one, and I did a lot of the writing.
"I think it's important - I don't like to use the word `entertaining,' because it isn't fun and games."
The special gave her a chance to go into a hospital nursery and hold a day-old infant she refers to as "Baby Amanda," who was, like the other infants there, perfectly content and quiet.
"It's been so long since I've held something so little," said Walters. "All the little babies were asleep. They'd been fed a half-hour earlier. They loved the hot lights. The next day, they all got released." The program's roundtable of experts included Walters' former roommate at Sarah Lawrence, Joan Marks, who is director of that college's human-genetics program.
The other panelists are Leroy Hood, a molecular biologist from California Institute of Technology; Paul Billings, director of Harvard Medical School's Clinic for Inherited Diseases; Arthur Caplan of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Minnesota; and Francis Collins, chief of the Division of Medical Genetics, University of Michigan.
Collins' assistant, Jeff Pinard, who appears in the special, is afflicted with cystic fibrosis. "A Perfect Baby" also gave Walters an opportunity to talk to the mother of a colleague, Chris Oden, an associate producer on ABC's "20/20." Among Pauline Oden's 11 children was a boy severely afflicted with Down's syndrome who lived 31 years.
Walters said her interest in making the special had been piqued by advances in genetic research and in-vitro fertilization.
"I had felt there were so many changes," she said. "There was a while we thought everything was environment; now it seems that it's all biological. And there were enormously provocative subjects, like sperm banks, to the kind of choices we will have to make about the quality of our lives, the questions we haven't even faced.
"There are questions that make you turn around and say, `What would I do?' And then this business of decisions: You may be making the right decision at the time and then things change. We're facing some of them right now, such as those insurance questions."
"Those insurance questions" may be formidable. Will a parent who knows his or her child may have a disease or handicap - such as Huntington's disease, which doesn't show up until middle age, or Down's syndrome, which is there at conception - have to pay larger health-insurance premiums on that child? Will a business corporation want to know its employees' genetic health histories before it offers a job?
Robert Waldron, a spokesman for the insurance industry, tells Walters that, "We're dealing here with unemerged technology, partial technology. The legal issues have to be settled. The ethical issues have to be settled. And until that happens, this industry is saying literally to the public: We're not touching it."
In addition to the pocketbook issues, the special offers a collection of interesting profiles of couples and individuals striving to have children.
Among them are Adrienne and David Ramm, who visited the Repository for Germinal Choice in Escondido, Calif., known as "the genius sperm bank" because it stocks sperm from Nobel Prize-winners, Olympic athletes and other high achievers.
by CNB